HPC in the Cloud: Amazon Cuts Prices on S3 Storage Service

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February 07, 2012

Amazon Cuts Prices on S3 Storage Service

Tiffany Trader

Amazon has cut prices on S3, its cloud-based storage service, effective Feb. 1. The news comes a week after the company announced that S3 had achieved an impressive year-over-year growth rate of 192%. At the end of 2011, there were 762 billion objects stored in Amazon S3, with 500,000 requests per second coming in during peak times.

AWS Here's what Amazon Web Services Evangelist Jeff Barr had to say when he broke the news on the company blog:

We continue to innovate on your behalf to drive down storage costs and pass along the resultant savings to you at every possible opportunity. We are now happy (some would even say excited) to announce another in a series of price reductions.

Barr also talks up the benefits that AWS's scale and focus creates for their customers. "Our ability to lower prices again now is an example of this principle at work," he writes.

Amazon S3 pricing is based on a tiered system, so the actual discount depends on the amount of data used. For example, with 50 TB of data stored, there will be about a 12% price reduction, while a customer who uses an average of 500 TB of storage will see a 13.5% reduction in costs. When S3 launched in 2006, it costs $0.15 per GB per month for the first TB, and now the same level of storage costs $0.125 per GB per month.

Barr reminds readers that an "added advantage of using a cloud storage service such as Amazon S3 over using your own on-premise storage is that with cloud storage, the price reductions that we regularly roll out apply not only to any new storage that you might add but also to the existing storage that you have."

Amazon's storage rates vary depending on where the data is stored. Prices for standard storage customers are listed below, while pricing for other regions can be found on the Amazon S3 Pricing page. Users of the AWS GovCloud region will also see lower prices, according to Barr.

Storage	Old (GB / Month)	New (GB / Month)
First 1TB	$0.140	$0.125
Next 49TB	$0.125	$0.110
Next 450TB	$0.110	$0.095
Next 500TB	$0.095	$0.090
Next 4000TB	$0.080	$0.080 (no change)
Over 5000TB	$0.055	$0.055 (no change)

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