News

Amazon Joins Microsoft in Slashing Cloud Services Pricing

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• June 30, 2011

Amazon Web Services announced a new pricing plan on Thursday for all of its cloud services, including its CloudFront content delivery network. 

The company has nixed the fees for inbound data transfers, as well as lowered the cost of outbound data transfers.

The move comes just one week after Microsoft said it is eliminating the charges for inbound data transfers for its Windows Azure service. Both companies' price changes take effect on July 1.

"There is no charge for inbound data transfer across all services in all regions," the company said in a blog post, where Amazon pointed to 14 price cuts over the past four years.

"That means, you can upload petabytes of data without having to pay for inbound data transfer fees. On outbound transfer, you will save up to 68 percent depending on volume usage. For example, if you were transferring 10 TB in and 10 TB out a month, you will save 52 percent with the new pricing. If you were transferring 500 TB in and 500 TB out a month, you will save 68 percent on transfer with the new pricing."

Under the new pricing scenario, it will cost $0.12 to send a GB, down from $0.15 for those sending up to 10 TB a month. On the higher end, those that transfer out 500 TB will pay only $0.50 per GB, down from $0.80.

The new costs are reflected in Amazon's pricing calculator.