Amazon Shaves Cloud Storage Costs

Amazon Web Services continues to whittle down the cost of its cloud services and on Monday slashed the cost of its Simple Storage Service (S3) cloud storage offering by 19 percent.

According to AWS, the 19 percent reduction is another feather in the cap for cloud computing as a viable and more affordable alternative to a hard-drive or other on-premise storage option.

"We've reduced the prices for Amazon S3 storage again. As is always the case, the cost to store your existing data will go down," Jeff Barr, Amazon cloud evangelist wrote in a blog post on Monday. "This is markedly different than buying a hard drive at a fixed cost per byte and is just one of the many advantages of using cloud-based storage."

The price cut is effective as of November 1 and applies to new and existing S3 users.

AWS also launched a new 1 TB pricing tier and removed the previous 50 TB to 100 TB pricing tier, a move the company said will offer volume discounts to more AWS S3 users. The new prices for standard storage are available in the U.S. Standard, Europe Ireland and APAC Singapore regions, Amazon said.

Next: The New S3 Pricing

The new pricing reduces the cost of the first 1 TB of S3 storage from 15 cents to 14 cents; the cost of the next 49 TB to 12.5 cents per GB from 15 cents and so on. The larger volumes of roughly 4,000 and above 5,000 TB of storage will remain at 8 cents per GB.

Additionally, Reduced Redundancy storage will continue to be priced one-third lower than standard storage in all reasons, Amazon said.

The S3 price drop comes the same day Amazon is launching a set of free cloud services to bring more users into the cloud. Last month, Amazon said it would release a subset of the Amazon EC2 cloud and S3 storage that is free for business users and developers for one year.

According to Amazon, starting on Monday AWS customers can run a free Amazon EC2 cloud instance for a year and also get access to a new free usage tier for the S3 cloud storage service, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing and AWS data transfer.

The S3 cost reduction also comes as Amazon Web Services continues looks for ways to cut cloud costs. In September, Amazon launched a new instance type dubbed Micro Instances that drop the cost to run low throughput applications starting at 2 cents per hour.