
Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014 - tluthra
http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/effective-april-2014/
======
thomaslangston
My concern is what it always been for AWS, no first party support for limiting
my bill. The best effort from AWS is just an email notification when they
"think" my bill is over a limit. If I can't limit my risk to a surprise bill
of thousands of dollars after missing a midnight email, I still can't use
their service at any usage based price other than free.

~~~
robbles
You actually can do this yourself quite readily, through use of CloudWatch
billing metrics (which can be broken down by individual service). Define some
alarms based on billing thresholds, and perform automated scaling actions in
response.

AWS can't exactly do this for you, as explained by previous commenters, but
they do give you the basic features you'd need for implementing it.

~~~
crucialfelix
There is a newrelic plugin that does this. It can graph your costs and raise
alerts.

AWS Costs & Usage Analytics [http://www.newvem.com/new-
relic/](http://www.newvem.com/new-relic/)

------
mkempe
Key quote: "We are lowering S3 storage prices by 36% to 65%, effective April
1st, 2014."

[http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/](http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/)

~~~
toomuchtodo
Unless you're storing massive amounts of data, no point in using Glacier now,
as it's still $0.01/GB (vs $0.03/GB for standard durability).

And wow. Hell of a price drop.

~~~
copergi
I don't think a few TB counts as "massive", and that still saves you over a
grand a year. Why move backups to a 3x more expensive service, what's the
upside?

~~~
toomuchtodo
Not having to wait 4-8 hours to access them. Also, pulling from S3 costs you
nothing (if you're in EC2 or other AWS services). Glacier access costs can get
expensive depending on the quantity of data you need to access in a short
period of time:

"Glacier is designed with the expectation that retrievals are infrequent and
unusual, and data will be stored for extended periods of time. You can
retrieve up to 5% of your average monthly storage (pro-rated daily) for free
each month. If you choose to retrieve more than this amount of data in a
month, you are charged a retrieval fee starting at $0.01 per gigabyte. Learn
more. In addition, there is a pro-rated charge of $0.03 per gigabyte for items
deleted prior to 90 days."

[http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/](http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/)

To store 1TB for a year in S3 is now $368.64

To store 1TB in Glacier for a year is $122.88

We're quibbling over ~$250/year?

~~~
brianwawok
What if you have 100 TB?

I would quibble over 25k a year..

------
callmeed
It would be interesting to go back through the Everpix post mortem docs[1] and
see if a big price swing like this could have put them in the black (or close
to it).

[1] [https://github.com/everpix/Everpix-
Intelligence](https://github.com/everpix/Everpix-Intelligence)

~~~
seanmccann
That's no different than startups of the past having to pay thousands to
millions of dollars to setup servers. These days those same servers can be
setup in minutes for a fraction of the cost.

Timing is everything. Sometimes the current market pricing for a commodity is
too expensive to make your business viable today but in the future that will
not be the case. Just depends how long that will take.

~~~
computer
If S3 storage pricing was the issue for this startup they could always have
gone with their own dedicated servers for storage for a fraction of the cost.
For that reason, I doubt a lower S3 cost would have prevented them from
shutting down.

~~~
garethl
Not sure how you can compare your own servers to s3 - s3 has redundancy built
in that can survive the loss of 2 data centers. I'm pretty sure it would be
more expensive to roll your own version of that...

~~~
vidarh
See my comment elsewhere with some numbers. You can beat S3 even with the new
pricing in many cases. With the old pricing its trivial.

 _With_ replication to 3 data centres.

------
thatthatis
As an AWS consumer, I'd like to thank google's cloud team for making this
announcement in early 2014 possible.

------
damon_c
This must be an incredible benefit to companies like Imgur or Dropbox where a
significant portion of their costs must be S3 storage.

~~~
daviding
It must, but I assume once you get to a certain level of usage then an account
manager / AWS gets you a slightly better than the publicly published deal. Is
that the case?

Also, I wonder if EC2 is up for a price tweak soon too?

EDIT: Ah -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7475284](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7475284)

~~~
imroot
If you have a direct-billed account, and are spending more than 1,000/month,
you'll get an automatic price break. At my current $DAYJOB, we're billing
around $15-20K/month (depending on traffic) in Amazon Web Services charges,
and I believe we're getting somewhere between a 10 and 25 percent price break.

------
programminggeek
Nothing should ever be announced or "effective" April 1.

~~~
_wesley_
I launched a company once on April 1. Realized the date after we'd announced
to everyone. We were worried about it impacting launch (is this a joke?), but
all was good.

~~~
camillomiller
Apple was founded on April 1st, 1976

------
TillE
Storage is cheap, but data transfer out is still $0.12/GB, over 10x more
expensive than other options.

~~~
tedivm
In my opinion they're doing that on purpose to discourage people from using S3
as both a storage _and_ a transfer method.

Storage and Delivery should be considered separate, as there are benefits to
it being a separate service. If you throw a CDN between your customers and S3
you'll not only get a significantly lower cost, you'll also give your
customers much better performance.

~~~
janson0
I just did some price comparison. It looks like cloudfront is actually the
same price as data transfer out of S3, but in addition you have to tack on a
$.02/GB fee to get the data to your cloudfront edge nodes.

If I am wrong about this (and I hope I am), where can I find more information
about that?

Thanks!

~~~
MichaelApproved
No, you're right. I use cloud front and you have to pay for the day at to go
from S3 to cloud front servers where it gets cached. Then the costs are
$0.14/gb in the cheapest region.

If your cache gets deleted or expired, you'll have to pay to move the data (at
s3 rates) to the CDN again when someone requests it.

------
mkempe
Given costs of storage and data center operations, what's the lowest,
commoditization-bound on standard Amazon S3 prices? Now they're reducing to a
narrow $27.50-30.00/TB-month, from the current $43-85/TB-month.

I've seen Internet Archive and Backblaze estimates that indicate $60-100/TB-
storage installation and $7/TB-year in power. If drives last 5 years, we could
expect a commodity cloud-storage price around $20/TB-year? One order of
magnitude to go.

~~~
ghoul2
a while back i wondered about the same thing (
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2787770](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2787770)
). It did occur later to me that S3/Google Cloud Storage and Archive/Backblaze
are really not the same thing. S3/GCS is FAST.

Backblaze, for example, has two gigabit ethernet ports for their new 180TB
pod. That means, even assuming no overhead, copying 1 POD to another will take
~9 days! Even were they to add additional/faster ports/interconnects, the 45
drives in a POD are still sitting on a PCIe 2.0 8x, thus with a theoretical
throughput of 4GB/s, thats still half a day.

Now, I do not know how many drives Amazon/Google load into their S3/GCS
servers, but my (dayjob) live storage servers rarely have more than 4 - 8
drives each. Even if we assume 8, thats a 5-6 fold increase in theoretical
throughput - and THAT is why S3/GCS will never be in the same pricing zone as
Backblaze.

S3/GCS, even Backupsy, DO, etc are all "live" storage solutions, and seems
most are converging to ~3 cents/GB-month. Backblaze is "archival" storage, and
will (probably) continue to be cheaper by a factor of 5-10 (or its won't be
worth the hassle).

------
aalpbalkan
Now for those without context, that was to match Google Cloud Platform's
aggressive offering they announced just yesterday. Now it's Windows Azure's
turn I guess.

------
frade33
Much expected after the GDrive prices got slashed.

Currently I am only using S3 for hosting PDF or other big size files which are
downloadable by the public, since the bandwidth is pay-as-go.

However for regular storage, Dropbox/GDrive are still the primary choice, due
to the fact, the data sync across devices, speaking of sync, what is holding
Amazon back from a similar app for S3?

~~~
dekhn
Gdrive is not a competitor to S3. Google Cloud Storage is.

~~~
frade33
I should have made it clear, thanks for pointing it out. I guess this was in
the wake of Google Cloud Platform pricing going down yesterday?

~~~
dekhn
I think they were planning to announce a price drop anyway as they are doing
their annual cloud shindig in SF today.

------
IgorPartola
This almost brings it down to where I can start backing things up onto S3.
Currently my home NAS houses just under 500 GB's of stuff. My requirements to
back this up offsite would be (1) full encryption of each file and filename
using a key only I hold and (2) reasonable per-month price to where I cannot
justify just buying another box with a bunch of drives and sticking them at a
friend's house.

I believe I can solve the former with S3, though I still don't know of a
turnkey solution. The latter is not quite there but this update brings it a
lot closer. At this point it would cost me $15/month or $180/year. That's not
terrible, but for that price I can easily have two 2TB WD Red drives. The box
to house them would cost just a bit more since I need no horsepower, but just
enough to run ZFS.

Glacier is a more attractive option, but the fact that the price is so complex
when transferring data out of it, I'd be looking at taking months to restore
everything just to not pay to dollar for it.

~~~
rmcpherson
Check out CamliStore at [http://camlistore.org/](http://camlistore.org/). It's
far more than backup, but it accomplishes that as well and supports S3 as well
as Google Cloud Storage.

~~~
IgorPartola
Very interesting. I will check it out further, thanks.

------
Goranek
Waiting for Azure response, should be any minute now i suppose.

------
elwell
Same date as Google's cloud storage price changes.

------
neya
Is it reasonable to expect Paas service providers like Heroku and Engineyard
also to cut their prices, or is it asking for too much? On one end, it seems
logical to me because their services are built on top of AWS for the most
part, on the other, I am not sure if this might happen since their selling
point is not the Infrastructure underneath, but rather the convenience and
ease of getting something up and running. I guess we'll just have to wait and
watch.

~~~
BHSPitMonkey
The linked page is only describing a price change in S3, not all AWS services
across the board (most of what you're doing with Heroku would be incurring EC2
costs).

~~~
neya
Thank you for the clarification, looks like I commented on the wrong thread xD

------
pkrumins
Am I reading this right that the new pricing is going to be 3 cents per GB and
the old pricing was 8.5 cents per GB? 2.8x drop in price! Wow!

------
8_hours_ago
I hope this causes services such as Tarsnap to reduce their prices. Doing a
full off-site backup, including pictures, is still pricey.

------
mkempe
Glacier storage cost isn't changing, just adding one decimal (extra zero).

------
jpeg_hero
nice to see that "GovCloud" is 4x more expensive

[http://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-
us/pricing/s3/](http://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/pricing/s3/)

the $12,000 hammer reinvented!!

~~~
daviding
While I don't know it's x4 worth it, I can personally testify to how expensive
anything FIPS 140 is to get done..

"Because the AWS GovCloud (US) Region is physically and logically accessible
by US persons only and also supports FIPS 140-2 compliant end points,
customers can manage more heavily regulated data in AWS while remaining
compliant with federal requirements."

[http://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/](http://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/)

~~~
duskwuff
Keep in mind that this means they're operating one or more facilities
exclusively for GovCloud. Since these facilities are almost certainly smaller
than the rest (and, as you mentioned, they're more work than normal), it only
stands to reason that it'd be more expensive to use.

------
tedchs
I'd like to propose a new rule for Hacker News: only if you have built the
thing you're saying someone should save money by building themselves, may you
say the person should build that thing.

------
volune
Thanks Google!

------
marktolson
This is amazing news. I have a image gallery site with ~500,000 images. It
currently costs me $39 a month and now I'll get to spend even less, no idea
how they do it.

------
rpedela
I hope these AWS pricing changes are not an early April Fool's joke. The S3
pricing in particular will be cheaper than the current pricing for the > 5000
TB tier.

------
hatred
It's pretty interesting that there have been no update to the Glacier prices
as of yet. I wonder what could a fair point price be ~ 1 cent per TB ?

------
patrickxb
I wish the cost for PUT requests would drop.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Unfortunately, PUTs are just more expensive computationally than reads. You
could always use a caching layer and only put for persistance.

------
mikelbring
Is it just the cost of storage that dropped? Bandwidth is still a major
burden.

------
MCarusi
We picked a good time to start using AWS! Nothing but positive things so far.

------
vlucas
April fools!

~~~
infecto
(mindblown)

~~~
vlucas
Man, I guess nobody likes even a little humor around here.

~~~
JNox64
I too, took some punishment for making a joke. HN is a dead serious place, I
guess.

~~~
mikeash
Jokes are welcome, but they have to actually be funny.

~~~
teemo_cute
But jokes do have their place right? They brighten someones day, for example.

I propose someone makes a subsection of Hacker News dedicated solely to jokes
or funny stuff.

Or someone create a new site... named.... Hacker-News-Chan?

------
atopuzov
Now I know why the soap in the toilets is not getting refiled.

