Cloudy Journey: Amazon slices S3 storage prices

Amazon is cutting S3 storage pricing for standard users, according to a post to the Amazon Web Services website.

With the change, effective February 1, 2012 but announced early Tuesday, a customer storing 50 TB of data will see a 12 percent price reduction for storage; a user with 500 TB of data will get 13.5 percent reduction, said AWS evangelist Jeff Barr on the AWS blog. Prices for standard S3 users are listed in the chart below. S3 prices for other regions is here and AWS GovCloud pricing is here.

Amazon has put pedal to the metal to get more customers to upload more of their data to S3. On January 25, the company unveiled AWS Storage Gateway as a way to help companies easily upload data from their on-premises storage to S3.

If numbers are any indication, S3 has been hugely successful. The number of objects stored in the S3 service ballooned 193 percent to 762 billion in the fourth quarter of 2011 from 262 billion for the year-ago quarter, Barr wrote in an earlier post.

Amazon’s end-game here is to get more businesses to put more of their data into its ecosystem. Once it’s there it’s a no brainer for companies to make use of other Amazon services. The net, net, net here is that Amazon wants everyone to use more of its core services — it is the high-volume, low-margin provider of these infrastructure services and it wants it to stay that way.

Feature photo courtesy of reserved Flickr user redjar

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.