Amazon To Cut S3 Storage Prices

Amazon.com on Thursday said it would cut storage prices on its S3 Web service for companies with more than 50 TB of data.

Companies storing from 50 TB to 100 TB will pay 14 cents per gigabyte in the United States and 17 cents per gigabyte in the European Union, Amazon said. For 100 TB to 500 TB, prices drop 1 cent per gigabyte, and 1 cent again for more than 500 TB. The new prices take effect Nov. 1.

Companies today pay 15 cents per gigabyte in the United States and 18 cents per gigabyte in the European Union, no matter how much data they store in Amazon's massive data center. Customers that store 50 TB or less will continue paying the current rate.

"The growth of Amazon Web Services has allowed us to become even more efficient and further lower our operating expenses," Alyssa Henry, general manager of Amazon S3, which stands for Simple Storage Service, said in a statement. "AWS remains committed to passing savings along to our customers."

In announcing the new pricing, the online retailer also released some statistics on the service. Amazon S3 stores more than 29 billion objects, up from 22 billion at the end of the second quarter. On Oct. 1, the service peaked at more than 70,000 requests per second to store, retrieve, or delete an object.

Amazon says companies of all sizes use the service. Those recently signing up for S3 include National Geographic; Sonian, which provides e-mail archiving; and Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which uses S3 for Web hosting, video streaming, and live timing and scoring applications.

Last month, Oracle introduced a collaboration with Amazon in which customers could run Oracle 10g and 11g databases and its Fusion middleware in virtual machines within Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, a sister service of S3.