Amazon Web Services reduces S3 storage prices by 25% and updates Glacier fees

Amazon Web Services has reduced storage costs by as much as a quarter in the Sydney region, as well as rationalising its pricing tiers from six down to three.

AWS announced the price reduction for S3 storage across the world, including all five of its Asia-Pacific availability zones, as part of its work to "relentlessly" reduce costs and "pass the resulting savings along in the form of a steady stream of AWS price reductions", chief evangelist Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post.

The price cuts follow recent reductions for AWS EC2 compute.

When the S3 changes go live on 1 December, users will only need to consider three pricing tiers: up to 50TB, 51-500TB and over 500TB. There are currently six pricing tiers.

Currently, the most expensive tier, for S3 storage up to 1TB, costs US$0.033 per GB per month. The next bracket, up to 50GB, costs US$0.0324 per GB.

Once the price cuts kick in, AWS will charge US$0.0250 per GB per month for up to 50GB, representing savings of 22.8 percent in Asia-Pacific.

The savings are greater for larger storage tiers, with the price of S3 over 500TB dropping from US$0.0313 to US$0.0230, a reduction of 26.5 percent.

When Amazon launched S3 in 2006, it cost 15 cents per GB per month.

"The lower pricing is a direct result of the scale that comes about when our customers trust us with trillions of objects, but it is just one of the benefits," Barr said.

"Based on the feedback that I get when we add new features, the real value of a cloud storage platform is the rapid, steady evolution. Our customers often tell me that they love the fact that we anticipate their needs and respond with new features accordingly."

AWS has also launched new pricing options for its Glacier long-term archival storage. "You can now pay a little bit more to expedite your data retrieval. Alternatively, you can indicate that speed is not of the essence and pay a lower price for retrieval," said Barr.

"We launched Glacier with a pricing model for data retrieval that was based on the amount of data that you had stored in Glacier and the rate at which you retrieved it. While this was an accurate reflection of our own costs to provide the service, it was somewhat difficult to explain. Today we are replacing the rate-based retrieval fees with simpler per-GB pricing."

The Glacier changes, which are already live, come in three options: "standard", which costs US$0.012 per GB and offers a data access time of 3-5 hours; "expedited", which costs US$0.036 per GB and offers a data access time of 1-5 minutes; and "bulk", at $0.003 per GB and 5-12 hours.