
Amazon S3 Price Reduction - jeffbarr
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/02/amazon-s3-price-reduction.html
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wlll
I graphed the old and new prices so you can see how they compare:

[http://willj.net/static/amazon_s3_old_and_new_price_comparis...](http://willj.net/static/amazon_s3_old_and_new_price_comparison.html)

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masterleep
It's still pretty expensive for archival storage without instant access
requirements. Can somebody please do a tape based cloud storage service with
slow file access but much cheaper per TB storage costs?

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jtchang
I wonder how slow you'd be willing to go.

Would you be willing to pay $1 for 100GB if it meant waiting 15 minutes to
load your tape? How about 30 minutes?

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bambax
For some data, I could wait a week. I take pictures and movies that take up a
lot of space; I don't want to ever lose them but they are not mission critical
in any way, shape or form.

I store everything on a NAS + another NAS as backup; it's a fairly safe setup
as long as my house doesn't burn down, isn't flooded or burglarized.

I would love an offsite backup solution that would be cheap because of very
slow reads: if my house burns down it'll be some time before I can access
those backups anyway.

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nchuhoai
Couldn't agree more. please notify me if you found a solution

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saurik
While Amazon keeps reducing the price of storage, I don't think they have ever
reduced the price of requests. :( I would have expected the cost of every
component of a request (CPU, bandwidth, etc.) would have gone down over time,
but it is still 1000 PUT/LISTs per $0.01 (or 10k GETs, also per $0.01). :(

(These request costs actually add up quite quickly: I spent something like $8k
on PUT/LIST last month. At one point I found out a client library I was using
made the horrible decision to verify the bucket existed with a LIST request
each time you made a connection; I tracked that down to $70/day I was losing.)

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libria
Interesting. That puts them from just above below Google's Cloud Storage to
just below,
[https://developers.google.com/storage/docs/pricingandterms#p...](https://developers.google.com/storage/docs/pricingandterms#pricing).
I didn't even think GCS was on their radar.

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justincormack
Amazon started cutting prices long before there was any competition. I dont
think this is due to Google, as for most people the difference in network
costs depending if you use EC2 matters more. It is probably more to do with
hard drive prices renormalizing after the flooding...

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afhof
I've never understood why they use a stair step function for pricing. Why not
just name a continuous function for pricing and simplify the scheme?

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notaddicted
The pricing function _is_ "continuous", it isn't differentiable.

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mshang
I think it was meant that the marginal cost function isn't continuous.

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jwr
What I find slightly worrying is that the cost of EC2 instances does not
decrease more with time. DRAM prices have fallen quite a bit since EC2
started, and yet the cost of EC2 remains relatively stable.

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Poiesis
I would imagine that their power costs have not fallen quite as quickly.

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jwr
Look at EC2 pricing — instance pricing is pretty much a function of RAM size.
I realize RAM isn't everything, but it is a large variable factor, with other
cost factors either being constant or not growing proportionally fast.

I'd still argue that we should see bigger drops in pricing, especially for the
large-memory instances.

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dangrossman
They're really using RAM as a proxy for other real costs. The amount of RAM
you allocate is a pretty good predictor for server/VPS utilization -- which
means their actual power, bandwidth and hardware replacement costs as you wear
out hardware faster. Virtually all unmanaged VPS and dedicated hosting
companies make RAM the primary factor in determining the monthly service cost
even though the price-per-gigabyte is more each month than it'd cost to buy
the physical RAM outright. In other words, it's a mistake to think that the
actual cost of RAM is the reason pricing is proportional to RAM size.

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Drbble
CPU is a better proxy for utilization than RAM, no? CPU uses far more energy
than a RAM, and I can write a low CPU web cache in 12GB RAM or a high CPU
scientific simulation in L2 cache.

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mthreat
This is good news. Now if they would lower their EC2 instance pricing,
especially large RAM instances!

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ellie42
What about Rackspace Cloud Files?
[http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/files/...](http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/files/pricing/)

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NARKOZ
See comparison[1]. It's still cheaper than Amazon. They don't charge for
requests and incoming bandwidth.

1:
[http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/files/...](http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/files/compare/)

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RKearney
Amazon also does not charge for inbound bandwidth. I'm not sure what you're
getting at. They also had to do the comparison with the additional support
package from Amazon to inflate the price to make their pricing model look more
appealing.

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jdelsman
(Bandwidth prices not withstanding.)

10,000,000,000 GET requests on Amazon = $1,000.00 (0.01/10000 reqs)
10,000,000,000 GET requests on Rackspace = $0.00 (FREE)

1,000 GB on Amazon = $125.00 (0.125/gb) 1,000 GB on Rackspace = $150.00
(0.15/gb)

Total Amazon: $1,250.00 Total Rackspace: $150.00

That's what he's getting at.

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match
Damn, that's a lot of GETs if you're just doing backup. What's up with that?

