AWS Price Reductions and Free Inbound Data Transfer

I’d like to say a few words about our pricing strategy, and then share some price reductions with you. Here are the most important tenets of our pricing strategy:

• We are always working to drive our costs (and thus, our prices) down for the benefit of our customers. The scale of AWS provides us with some advantages when we negotiate with our suppliers on your behalf.
• The price of each service in each AWS Region is a fairly accurate reflection of our cost to do business in the Region. We pass the savings along to you when you use resources that are running in low-cost areas.
• We offer you a lot of choices — operating system, location (Region), instance type, and (in the case of Amazon EC2) both on-demand and reserved instances to allow you to control your costs by optimizing for your own unique usage patterns.
• The newly revised AWS Simple Monthly Calculator can help you to estimate your costs.

And now for the good part! The following price reductions are in effect, retroactive to December 1, 2009:

Amazon S3 – We are announcing a storage price reduction of more than 15% across all of our storage tiers in the EU (Ireland) Region.  We have lowered our base price tier in the EU (Ireland) Region to only $0.150 per GB per month and are also reducing storage costs by over 20% for our petabyte scale customers in the Region.

In addition, we have reduced the price of our 500 TB tier and have added two new storage tiers across all Amazon S3 Regions for our largest customers. S3 storage in excess of 1 PB per month is billed at $0.08 per GB per month in the US Standard and EU (Ireland) Regions and $.095 in the Northern California Region.  S3 storage in excess of 5 PB per month is billed at $0.055 per GB per month in the US Standard and EU (Ireland) Regions and $0.070 per GB per month in the Northern California Region.

Amazon EC2 – Amazon EC2 instances running Windows or SQL Server in the EU Region now cost $0.12 (small).

Finally, we are waiving the inbound data transfer fee across the board (for all services) through the end of June 2010. Here’s your chance to build a web crawler or to upload scads of data into AWS without having to pay for inbound data transfer!

— Jeff;