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Price War Drives 1TB Online Storage Below US$33 Per Month

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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.

 

An Easy Way to Copy Files Between Cloud Storage Apps

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Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive, Dropbox, Box. The number of options for storing your business documents in the cloud grows each year. But how do you switch between them?

Labnol.org has posted a short blog about a service called Mover.io that transfers files and folders from one cloud storage service to another. The service works on a freemium model – you can transfer up to 10 GB of data for free and then pay $1 per extra GB of transfer.

Mover can even move files to and from enterprise storage with Amazon S3 – and from there to Amazon’s super-cheap archiving service, Glacier, which charges as little as 1c per GB.

As Labnol.org writes:

Mover has connectors for all popular cloud storage providers. You may copy files from your Google Drive to Dropbox, from SkyDrive to Box or even from your old Google account to the new one. They also support FTP allowing you to directly transfer files from Google Drive or Dropbox to your FTP server, over the cloud.

There are no restrictions on individual file size limits (except for SkyDrive) and you may transfer unlimited number of files. Mover creates a mirror copy of your folders on the destination service but if a folder on the source drive has too many files, you have an option to zip them all in a single file before the transfer.

The activity log (see next screenshot) in your Mover dashboard offers a near real-time view of ongoing transfers and the service also sends a detailed email notification when a transfer job has been processed.

Image credit: Mover

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