Amazon is Still the Leader When it Comes to Cloud Pricing

The popularity of Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS has grown to record levels and continues to grow at a very rapid pace. During the last four years, the object stored on Amazon’s S3 servers increased from 262 million to over two trillion.

With the increase in the scale of storage, Amazon has decided to further reduce tariffs on hosting. In February, the cloud leader will significantly reduce the prices of its Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Block Store (EBS). In addition, Amazon is also introducing two new M3 instance sizes and types that will come with SSD-based internal storage.

Amazon will cut Amazon S3 storage prices by up to 22 percent across all regions. The EBS prices will be lowered by up to 50 percent for storage and I/O requests. The pricing going forward will vary by region but every single region will see some sort of reduction on EBS and I/O requests.

The new M3 medium and large instances will start at $0.113 per hour and will replace the older and slower M1 instances.  By default, the M3 instance type will offer 4GB of SSD storage, 3.75 GB of RAM and one virtual CPU. The large instances will come with 32 GB of SSD storage, seven GB of RAM and two virtual CPUs. Prices vary on a region-to-region basis but start at $0.113 per hour (m3.medium), or $0.225 (m3.large).

The price cut will be favorable for large customers. For storage that exceeding more than 5000TB, Amazon will drop price by 22 percent. Those who are using a terabyte will save 11 percent, between one and 50TB on S3 will save 6 percent and others will save up to 6 to 15 percent. Amazon has also added support for instance store-backed AMIs for all M3 instance sizes.

AWS routinely cuts their cloud pricing and as per the company this is AWS’ 40th price drop. Amazon is facing tough competition with Google and Microsoft to maintain its lead in cloud computing and tries to woo more developers to come to its solutions with lower prices, more hardware offerings and more advanced technologies.

Last year, Google made its cloud platform Google Compute Engine service available for all. The platform offers developers the flexibility to build both managed and unmanaged services that run on Google’s infrastructure applications. Google has reduced the price of Persistent Disk by 60% per Gigabyte and the largest Persistent Disk volumes have up to 700% higher peak I/O capability. Microsoft, on the other hand, recently progressed enough to be a serious threat to Amazon’s dominance in the market.

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