Amazon Axes Cloud Storage Prices

Amazon Web Services (AWS) took the hatchet to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) prices, cloud storage cutting the cost by as much as 13.5 percent.

The price drop comes as Amazon S3 experiences massive growth. The Amazon S3 cloud storage service closed out 2011 with more than 762 billion objects stored, which reflects year-over-year growth of 192 percent.

"As you can tell from my recent post on Amazon S3 growth for 2011, our customers are uploading new objects to Amazon S3 at an incredible rate. We continue to innovate on your behalf to drive down storage costs and pass along the resultant savings to you at every possible opportunity. We are now happy (some would even say excited) to announce another in a series of price reductions," AWS evangelist Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post announcing the price cuts.

[Related: Amazon Q3 Cloud Revenue Skyrockets ]

With the cloud storage price change, all standard Amazon S3 storage customers should see "a significant reduction in their storage costs," Barr wrote, noting that users who store 50 TB of data will see a 12 percent price reduction for cloud storage, and users who store 500 TB of data will see a cut of 13.5 percent from their Amazon S3 cloud storage costs.

The price cut affects each cloud storage tier differently. According to AWS, the cost for the first 1 TB of S3 storage dropped to $0.125 per GB per month from $0.14; for the next 49 TB, Amazon chopped $0.015 from the GB-per-month costs, lowering it to $0.110; for the next 450 TB, AWS reduced the GB-per-month cost to $0.095 from $0.110; and for the next 500 TB the cost has been lowered to $0.090 from $0.095.

The price changes took effect Feb. 1, Amazon said.

"It might be useful for you to remember that an added advantage of using a cloud storage service such as Amazon S3 over using your own on-premise storage is that with cloud storage, the price reductions that we regularly roll out apply not only to any new storage that you might addm but also to the existing storage that you have," Barr wrote. "This could amount to considerable financial savings for many of you.

The Amazon S3 cloud storage price reduction comes on the heels of a pair of key products launched from Amazon and its AWS cloud services play. First, Amazon launched a NoSQL cloud database dubbed DynamoDB. Amazon followed the database launch with the release of the AWS Storage Gateway, a cloud backup and disaster recovery service that connects an on-premise software appliance with cloud-based storage for integration between on-premise and AWS cloud infrastructure.