Amazon Reduces AWS Cloud Storage Prices

Storing data in a cloud just got a little cheaper after Amazon Web Services (AWS) reduced the price for its Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), effective 1 February.

In a 6 February blog post, Amazon Web Service evangelist Jeff Barr announced a new series of price reductions for the S3 service, noting that AWS continues to innovate on its customers’ behalf to drive down storage costs and pass the saving back to the customer base.

Price Cuts

“With this price change, all Amazon S3 standard storage customers will see a significant reduction in their storage costs,” Barr said in his post. “For instance, if you store 50TB of data on average, you will see a 12% reduction in your storage costs, and if you store 500TB of data on average, you will see a 13.5% reduction in your storage costs.”

Barr said effective 1 February, 2012, the following prices are in effect for Amazon S3 standard storage in the US Standard region:

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)

The prices for the other regions are listed on the Amazon S3 Pricing page, Barr said. For the AWS GovCloud region, the new lower prices can be found on the AWS GovCloud Pricing page, he noted.

“It might be useful for you to remember 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,” Barr said. “This could amount to considerable financial savings for many of you.”

Storage Growth

Meanwhile, in a 30 January post, Barr cited the significant growth in objects stored on S3 between 2010 and 2011. Barr said that as of the end of 2011, there were 762 billion objects in Amazon S3. “We process over 500,000 requests per second for these objects at peak times,” he said.

This spike in storage represents year-over-year growth of 192 percent, Barr said.

Moreover, S3 grew faster last year than it did in any year since it launched in 2006, he said.