Amazon Web Services: Lower Data Transfer Costs

Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon at The Next Web Conference in 2008.

One of the hot companies here in San Francisco is not a start-up but a well established company who launched a new service that almost every new hot start-up seems to rely on. I’m talking about the Amazon Web Hosting services.

The May issue of Wired magazine features an interesting story about the ideas behind offering this service and Amazon’s vision for the future. One quote from Jeff Bezos I liked:

‘You don’t generate your own electricity, why generate your own computing?’

Today Amazon announces that they will lower the cost of their hosting platform even further. As they explain: ‘We’ve often told you that one of our goals is to drive down costs continuously and to pass those savings on to you. We have been able to reduce our costs for data transfer, so we’re pleased to announce that we’re lowering our pricing for data transfer, effective May 1, 2008. You’ll notice below that we’ve reduced price at every existing usage tier of transfer out, as well as added an additional tier for the heaviest users.’ Here are the old and new prices:

Current data transfer price (through April 30, 2008)
$0.100 per GB – data transfer in
$0.180 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.160 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB – data transfer out / month over 50 TB

New data transfer price (effective May 1, 2008)
$0.100 per GB – data transfer in
$0.170 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.110 per GB – next 100 TB / month data transfer out
$0.100 per GB – data transfer out / month over 150 TB

Unfortunately data transferred between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3-Europe will be charged at regular rates which is kind of a bummer for European companies thinking of switching to Amazon S3.

With the new pricing structure some clients will be able to save as much as 26% of their monthly bandwidth fees.