News

Amazon Web Services Cuts Prices, Increases Instance Sizes

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• January 23, 2014

Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced it is reducing pricing for its S3 and Elastic Block Storage Service (EBS).

The cloud provider will reduce S3 pricing by 22 percent and EBS will cost up to 50 percent less.

As usual, those using the largest amount of capacity will save the most. S3 customers will save at least 1 cent per gigabyte, with pricing for those using less than a terabyte paying $0.85, down from $0.95, which amounts to an 11 percent reduction. Those using more than 500 TB of the S3 storage service will save 22 percent, with pricing per GB dropping from $0.055 to $0.043. S3 customers using 1 to 50 TB of capacity will see pricing drop by only 6 percent from $0.080 to $0.075.

Amazon more substantially reduced its EBS pricing, the storage service for customers requiring lower-latency block storage rather than the object storage S3 provides. While the company noted that its price changes vary from region to region, it said the cuts are as high as 50 percent in some locations -- notably the Northern Virginia region, where EBS standard volumes could drop from $0.10 and $0.05.

Meanwhile, Amazon also said it was adding two new instance sizes to its second-generation EC2 instances, called M3.

"The M3 instances offer higher clock frequencies, significantly improved memory performance, and SSD-based instance storage, all at a lower price," noted AWS evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog post. "If you are currently using M1 instances, switching to M3 instances will provide your users with better and more consistent performance while also decreasing your AWS bill."

The two new instance sizes are both smaller than the original two launched a year ago. The new m3.medium with one virtual CPU, and m3.large with two virtual CPUs join the m3.xlarge with four vCPUs and m3.2xlarge (eight vCPUs) instances Amazon launched last year.