Amazon Web Services is cutting prices … again. The company just announced a series of price reductions related to its S3 storage service, with Jeff Barr of AWS explaining the rationale in a blog post.
S3, which stands for Simple Storage Service, is used by companies to store everything from Web applications to digital content.
“With this price change, all Amazon S3 standard storage customers will see a significant reduction in their storage costs,” Barr writes. “For instance, if you store 50 TB of data on average you will see a 12% reduction in your storage costs, and if you store 500 TB of data on average you will see a 13.5% reduction in your storage costs.”
Amazon has reduced prices before for its services, part of an overall strategy by the Seattle company to pass savings back to customers on its popular set of cloud services.
The landscape for cloud services, including offerings from providers such as Microsoft and EMC, is getting all the more competitive. But Amazon has been able to hold on to a first-mover advantage, driven in part by its culture of razor thin retail-style profit margins.
As cloud services become more of a commodity, Amazon believes it can continue to compete on price.
“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 add but also to the existing storage that you have,” Barr notes. “This could amount to considerable financial savings for many of you.”
