Amazon S3 - Busier Than Ever

Amazon S3 usage has grown very nicely in the last quarter and now stands at 29 billion objects, up from 22 billion just a quarter ago. As one of the S3 engineers told me last week, that's over 4 objects for every person now on Earth!

Our customers are keeping S3 pretty busy too. To give you an example of what this means in practice, the peak S3 usage for October 1st was over 70,000 storage, retrieval, and deletion requests per second.

All of this usage drives increasing economies of scale, or (in plain English) lower costs. I am happy to say that, effective November 1st, 2008, a new tiered pricing model for Amazon S3 storage will go in to effect. The new model features four price tiers, with prices decreasing based on the amount of storage used by each customer. Here is a full breakdown:

Tier	US	EU	Description
0-50 TB	$0.150/GB	$0.180/GB	First 50 TB per month of storage used
50-100 TB	$0.140/GB	$0.170/GB	Next 50 TB per month of storage used
100-500 TB	$0.130/GB	$0.160/GB	Next 400 TB per month of storage used
500+ TB	$0.120/GB	$0.150/GB	Storage used per month over 500 TB

Customers large, small, and in-between have put S3 to all sorts of uses. Here are a few that you might find interesting:

National Geographic's topo.com site stores seamless image maps for the entire United States in S3. You'll need to register in order to see the maps.

Oracle Secure Backup now includes a Cloud Module which supports direct, multi-threaded backup to S3. Read the new white paper to learn more.

-- Jeff;

PS - We'll be updating the AWS Calculator when the new pricing model goes in to effect.

Comments

[daveschappell]

Jeff and team -- that's just amazing -- so proud of all of you!

[Kieran Benton]

Sorry to be thick - when you say:

"0-50 TB $0.150 $0.180 First 50 TB per month of storage used"

Is that $0.15 per GB or TB?

[Paul M. Watson]

For a second there I thought that was 15 cents per month for 50TB. It is per GB still I assume.

[Eddy]

Wait, does that really mean I can store up to 50 TB per month for a total of 0,15$ ? Can't be...too cheap. Am I missing something here, or did I just witness an epic storage revolution? What is the exact price per GByte per month as of now?

[Steve]

I'd just like to point out that the email i received mentioning the price changes was a little misleading. it said the old price was 0.15/GB and the new price was 0.15 for the first 50TB. a clearer description would have been 0.15/gb for the first 50TB. Also, while any price decreases are welcome, and S3 is still very cheap, i cant imagine that the average person will have more than 50TB's of data on S3. So yes, lower prices are good, but i am curious as to how many people it would actually affect (or who would make significant savings because of it)

[Leila Boujnane]

Congratulations!

[Stephen]

That table above isn't exactly clear. It implies that the first 50 TB costs only $0.15/month, which I doubt to be true because that's a 1000x reduction in costs over the previous pricing. Not even Moore's law predicts that kind of cost reduction.

However if that is true, wow!

But I'm guessing it's not.

[Scott]

Did you mean to have the tiers at the GB level instead of the TB level? How many customers use > 50 terabytes per month? Am I misunderstanding?

[Charbax]

First 1TB costs $150 per month just for storage? That's the same price as buying a 1TB hard drive on the open market, a basic SATA hard drive. Why don't you provide some secondary class, much cheaper such as 10x cheaper storage using cheaper hard drives behind some kind of buffer wall (not with direct full bandwidth access), kind of like cheap backup type of storage somehow..

[Tom Cone]

Jeff

You would have even more users if you made the sign-up process easier

Our service helps people use their own S3 account to host and manage their own media. Once they have their own S3 account, they can embed and deploy their media on any of their commercial sites, blog sites, partner sites and even eBay pages.

I see it like the splitting of design from content as CMS packages empowered the site-owners to take more control over their publishing - we help split off high-bandwidth media and allow the site owners to leverage the S3 package: no views, no fees.. large views, guaranteed scale.

But.. we have soo many complaints and are having to hand-hold people through the S3 sign-up process???

Can't you make it any easier?

And what about an affiliate package?

TomC
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