Amazon cuts the price of its domain-name service in the cloud

Public-cloud market leader Amazon Web Services is back at it, lowering the prices of its tools. This time, its Route 53 managed domain-name service (DNS) for translating domain names into IP addresses is becoming less expensive.

Didn’t Mark Twain once say, “If you don’t like the prices for Amazon Web Services now, just wait a few minutes”?

Anyway. Starting tomorrow, customers pay 40 cents, not 50 cents, for every million queries up to a billion queries per month, according to a blog post today from Amazon cloud chief evangelist Jeff Barr.

Route 53 isn’t the biggest service among Amazon Web Services customers, but now it could become popular and appear more compelling in relation to managed DNS providers like Dyn and EasyDNS.

Price-cutting like this is typical for Amazon Web Services. Other recent cuts have brought down the prices of S3 object storage, EC2 compute instances, and the Elasticache caching service.

New evidence suggests that Amazon cloud price cuts aren’t always the best way to post short-term gains.

But Amazon CFO Tom Szkutak told analysts during the company’s recent earnings call, “[It] is fair to say that [price changes] certainly did impact our Q2 results in a meaningful way.”

Expect more price cuts in, oh, another few minutes.