The price to store 1 terabyte online has edged closer to US$30 a month after Amazon Web Services cut prices to compete with recent moves by Google and Microsoft. The cost to store online a gigabyte of data with Amazon S3 fell by an average of 51 percent to US33c per month, effective 1 April for the Asia Pacific region.
Amazon already offered US1c per gigabyte storage through its archival service Glacier. However, Glacier placed restrictions on the speed of restoring data, and retrieval also attracted more costs.
Under the old plan, the first terabyte cost US$94 per month and subsequent terabytes (up to 50 terabytes) cost US$84 per month. The prices in the new plan were US$33 and US$29.50 respectively.
Prices were automatically adjusted on AWS bills automatically. On-demand compute service EC2 cut the price of its M3 instance by 38 percent and the C3 instance by 30 percent. Other EC2 instances (M1, M2, C1 and CC2) were reduced between 10 and 40 percent.