AWS cuts S3 standard storage prices by up to 28%

Public cloud market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced changes to the pricing structure for its Glacier cold storage service, as well as price cuts for its widely used S3 standard cloud storage.

For S3 standard storage, prices are going down as much as 28.13 percent and will be as low as 2.1 cents per GB of data per month, effective December 1, AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post. That price is only available when storing more than 500 TB and in AWS’ US East (Northern Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland) data center regions.

On the Glacier side, AWS will no longer charge customers based on the rate at which they retrieve data. Instead, there are new Standard, Expedited, and Bulk tiers. Standard is what was always available from Glacier, and generally allows customers to retrieve data in 3-5 hours for 1 cent per GB and 5 cents for every thousand requests. The Expedited tier, which generally provides data in 1-5 minutes, costs 3 cents per GB and 1 cent per request. (Additionally, customers can pay $100 a month for provisioned capacity in high-demand periods for at least three expedited retrievals every five minutes with no more than 150MB/second of throughput.) And the Bulk tier will generally take 5-12 hours and come out to a quarter of a cent per GB and 2.5 cents for every thousand requests.

AWS regularly cuts cloud prices when it racks up more customers and data; an Elastic Block Store (EBS) price cut was announced in August. Other public cloud infrastructure providers also cut their prices from time to time.

Competitor Google Cloud Platform recently introduced new cold storage tiers.

Earlier today, AWS announced a price cut for Custom Metrics through its CloudWatch monitoring service.