Amazon Web Services suffered a massive outage back in April, one that caused all sorts of havoc developers. So, here’s one way that Amazon is giving back to those who use its platform. The company just announced that it will be lowering the price for its AWS Data Transfer service. Effective July 1, the company will no longer charge for data transfer in. At the same time, it has lowered prices for data transfer out in the U.S. and Europe, providing double digit savings to some customers.
“…. A customer transferring 10 TB in and 10 TB out of one of these regions in a month will save 52% on internet data transfer with the new pricing. A customer transferring 500 TB in and 500 TB out of one of these regions in a month will save 68% on internet data transfer with the new pricing,” the company writes.
Customers of the company’s CloudFront content delivery network also will see savings of as much as 43 percent once the new pricing takes effect on July 1.
In a note to customers, AWS said that it has reduced pricing more than a dozen times in the past four years. Here’s a closer look at the old and new CloudFront pricing plan.
UPDATE: Amazon isn’t the only one cutting prices on cloud computing services. Just a few hours after learning about the AWS price cut, we received word that Windows Azure Platform also plans to offer free data transfers in both peak and off-peak times as of July 1.
“This change can potentially result in cost savings if your application currently has large amounts of inbound traffic or if you have large quantities of existing data that you want to migrate to the Windows Azure platform,” the company wrote in a message to customers.
UPDATE: An astute reader points out that Microsoft initiated the price cut, pointing to this June 22 story from Mary-Jo Foley which notes that inbound data transfers through Azure will be free as of July 1. It is interesting to see these two tech titans of Seattle jockey over the cloud computing battlefront. Think we’ll see more of that in the future?
