Amazon Web Services Reduces Storage Pricing

Makes cloud storage a more enticing alternative to buying hard storage; lowers the cost for those already storing data on the cloud.

Amazon Web Services, a cloud computing company, yesterday announced that it has reduced the prices for its cloud storage service Amazon S3 (aws.amazon.com/s3), making not only cloud storage a more enticing alternative to buying hard storage, but also lowering the cost for those already storing data on the cloud. The company says that the cost of storage will be up to 19 percent less than before, effective November 1, 2010. There's a new pricing tier at the 1 TB level, and the current 50 to 100 TB tier has been removed, effectively extending the volume discounts to more Amazon S3 customers.

According to it, Amazon S3 provides virtually limitless scalability, 'eleven nines' (99.999999999 percent) of durability, and the choice of four distinct geographic locations for data storage. The new prices apply to standard storage in the US Standard, EU - Ireland, and APAC - Singapore regions. The discounts are skewed towards making smaller storage allotments cheaper, starting with the first 1 TB now being $0.14 per GB, down from $0.15 before. The most significant drop in price is at the 50 to 400 TB level, which went from $0.14 to $0.11 per GB. The company adds that its Reduced Redundancy storage (that provides 99.99 percent durability rather than eleven nines) will continue to be two-thirds the price of standard storage in all regions.

It claims that price reductions have been significant for the company's customers, and organizations that have built solutions that use the company to support their products. It has been lowering the price of its computing, which some say coincides with the inevitable downward shift in the price of computing. In September, for instance, the company launched 'Micro Instances,' offering a low price option for running lower throughput applications and websites that consume significant compute cycles only periodically. Earlier this year, it reduced the price for its content delivery network service, CloudFront, by 25 percent across the board, meaning that 10,000 requests now cost only $0.0075.