

Amazon Web Services Drops S3 Storage Service Pricing About 25% - beingpractical
http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/28/amazon-web-services-drops-storage-pricing-about-25/

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rkalla
As a quick FYI, I see in the comments below people comparing s3 pricing to the
likes of a VPS instance storage from XYZ hosting company.

Given that you have no redundancy with that storage you could save an addition
30% and use reduced redundancy storage in s3 which still provides redundancy
to a second AZ (just not all of them or across regions in the odd case of US
Standard)

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sarah2079
I really like that I can trust Amazon to keep AWS prices reasonable. I have
used both AWS and App Engine, and while I love App Engine for ease of use, the
pricing changes still make me feel skittish about using it for big projects
even though they happened a year ago.

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ck2
I wonder if dreamobjects being S3 api compatible and only 7 cents helped force
the price decrease.

What I like about dreamobjects is no charge for get/put requests which can
really add up with many small items being publicly hosted.

Maybe there's a remote chance of Amazon dropping "put" charges but I doubt
they will drop "get" charges.

Ah I see Google dropped their fees first earlier this week so that was
probably the pressure point. I thought Google came afterwards.

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zrail
Is this just storage or is it transfer as well?

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rsync
That's key. I didn't deeply parse the announcement, but I don't see any
mention of transfer - just the per GB storage rates.

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heartbreak
Deeply parse? Really? Just say you didn't read it.

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bitops
I believe the 'economies of scale' argument, but I also imagine that this move
is related to the RedShift announcement. If Amazon wants users to use their
offering for data warehousing and analytics, they'll need lots of cheap
storage for hosting the data.

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sixQuarks
Sorry for my ignorance, but the pricing is a bit confusing for me. Let's say I
have 1 GB of files, and I do 1 Terrabyte of downloads per month, how much
would I pay?

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zachanker
Since you're only using 1GB, you would pay 9.5 cents for the storage a month.
Then about $122.76/month for the bandwidth since the first GB is free and it's
$0.120 per GB afterwards up to 10TB.

Making it around $122.855/month total. This change doesn't really reduce your
costs by much since most of it in bandwidth which hasn't changed.

<http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/> (standard storage pricing hasn't been
updated yet)

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film42
I become more and more amazed at the price of storage but in the same breath I
am still horrified at the price of data at scale.

Right now I have a VPS at Carat Networks to throw crap on and I pay $15/m. For
that I get 50GB of space and 500GB of transfer. I understand the speed and
reliability is greatly improved with S3, but as a simple file host, it still
makes sense for me to throw it on a vps or low-end dedicated server at 1/10 -
1/3 the cost of ^this^ projection.

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bigiain
" … I am still horrified at the price of data at scale."

This isn't "the price of data at scale", this is "the price of flexible,
reliable, available data at scale"

I think what some people don't understand, is that Amazon _aren't_ trying to
compete on price.

With Amazon, you're paying a premium for the ability to scale, both up and
down, very quickly.

Rackspace, Linode, and some-guy-subletting-racks-in-some-local-datacenter can
easily beat EC2 prices for "general purpose servers". What Amazon does
differently is let you quickly and easily go from 1 "server" to 10 or 100
servers, then switch most of them back off again 4 hours later. I deal with a
great local hosting guy, who can (and does) fast track provisioning for me at
times, but if I called him and said "Ummm, the CEO is on Oprah tonight, I need
100 additional webservers, a load balancer or two, and a dozen database
slaves; to keep my not-architected-for-scale-but-suddenly-in-need-of-it web
app alive at 8:30pm tonight", there's no way he'd be able to do it. And even
if he _could_ there's now way he'd agree to if I said "and I only want to pay
for it all until midnight, then shut all the extra down and go back to
charging me for my single instance".

"$1000 per terabyte per year" might seem crazy expensive if a sensible
alternative for your data storage requirements is to go to BestBuy and grab a
2TB external drive for ~$100. But that's a _very_ different thing to what
Amazon are selling...

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Negitivefrags
I would rather pay 1/5th the price of Amazon for all the other days when I am
not on Oprah though.

Our current CDN provides for 4k per month what amazon would charge 18k for.

Yes, that 4k is on a 12 month contract that we had to negotiate. We are paying
for about 4 times the bandwidth per month that we are actually consuming at
the moment, but it's just so much cheaper overall and the bandwidth we don't
consume each month rolls over to the next. (We plan to consume it all one
day!)

I firmly believe that the vast majority of AWS customers are paying for
flexibility that they are not actually using 99% of the time.

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alexpopescu
Google reduces prices with 20%... Amazon with 25%. Game on!

