Lower Pricing for Amazon S3

Amazon Web Services LLC, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc., announced that it will lower prices for the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) effective November 1, 2008. New tiered pricing will offer significant volume discounts so customer costs will continue to decrease as their storage volume grows. As always, there is no minimum fee, no long term commitment, and developers pay only for what they use. Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store any amount of data in either the US or Europe and retrieve the data, at any time, from anywhere on the web.

Today, there are over 29 billion objects stored in Amazon S3, up from 22 billion at the end of Q2 2008. On October 1st, the service peaked at over 70,000 requests per second to store, retrieve, or delete an object. Businesses of all sizes are taking advantage of Amazon S3 to store and back up their data, host their static website content, or share files with their external business partners in a secure, scalable, reliable, and cost-effective way. Now, Amazon S3 customers will benefit from even lower storage prices with the following tiered pricing:

Tier             US               EU                  Description
0-50 TB       $0.150/GB    $0.180/GB      First 50TB/month used
50-100 TB   $0.140/GB    $0.170/GB      Next 50TB/month used
100-500 TB  $0.130/GB   $0.160/GB      Next 400TB/month used
500+ TB      $0.120/GB   $0.150/GB      Over 500TB/month used

“The growth of Amazon Web Services has allowed us to become even more efficient and further lower our operating expenses. AWS remains committed to passing savings along to our customers. Just six months ago, we announced a reduction in data transfer costs, and today we’re pleased to pass new storage savings along to our customers,” said Alyssa Henry, general manager of the Amazon Simple Storage Service.

From fast-growing startups to global enterprises, companies of all sizes are taking advantage of on demand storage provided by Amazon S3.

Some of the companies which have recently adopted Amazon S3 include:

• National Geographic’s, topo.com, provides seamless topographic maps for the entire U.S. Users can buy maps, download updated trail and trip information and even create trip maps to share with their friends. “We’ve been very pleased with the performance and reliability of Amazon Web Services,” said Paul Glauthier, vice president of Research Development for National Geographic Maps. “Prior to Amazon S3, the resources required to host such a large data set would have been cost prohibitive. By utilizing AWS, we are able to focus on creating new and innovative functionality for our users.”
• Sonian is a large-scale content archive that solves email compliance, e-discovery and storage issues for enterprises of all sizes. “Sonian uses Amazon S3, as well as Amazon EC2, Amazon SQS and Amazon SimpleDB to power our solution and achieve incredible scale and reliability,” said Greg Arnette, co-founder and chief technology officer for Sonian. “Amazon Web Services is a pioneer in cloud compute technologies and has enabled Sonian to provision enterprise-friendly and secure storage and compute, without sacrificing data security and performance.”
• “Oracle is pleased to team with AWS on cloud computing for our enterprise customers. With Oracle Secure Backup Cloud module, customers can use Amazon S3 for reliable, scalable database backup into the cloud with virtually unlimited capacity and no up-front capital expenditures,” said Robert Shimp, group vice president Oracle Global Technology Business Unit. “The introduction of volume pricing for Amazon S3 should make this an even more compelling value proposition.”
• Indycar.com and indy500.com utilize Amazon Web Services for web hosting, live video streaming, and live timing and scoring applications. “AWS allows us to use only the servers we need and save us the additional costs of managing our own hardware. During the Indianapolis 500 in May, we were able to save over 50% in costs,” said Adrian Payne, manager of online services for the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Businesses in a variety of industries are taking advantage of the instant scalability that Amazon Web Services provides. Over 400,000 developers have registered to use Amazon Web Services.