Amazon just sent a letter detailing price changes for the S3 service. They’re as follows:
Current bandwidth price (through May 31, 2007)
$0.20 / GB – uploaded
$0.20 / GB – downloadedNew bandwidth price (effective June 1, 2007)
$0.10 per GB – all data uploaded$0.18 per GB – first 10 TB / month data downloaded
$0.16 per GB – next 40 TB / month data downloaded
$0.13 per GB – data downloaded / month over 50 TB
Data transferred between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 will remain free of chargeNew request-based price (effective June 1, 2007)
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requestsStorage will continue to be charged at $0.15 / GB-month used.
The reason for the change is also given in the email:
There are two primary costs associated with uploading and downloading files: the cost of the bandwidth itself, and the fixed cost of processing a request. Consistent with our cost-following pricing philosophy, we determined that the best solution for our customers, overall, is to equitably charge for the resources being used – and therefore disaggregate request costs from bandwidth costs.
As regards to who is going to be impacted the most, sites which host against S3 that have a lot of RESTful activity are going to be seeing new charges, and it will be interesting to see what happens in this regard. This change also encourages such sites to look at using EC2 for their processing, as well as S3 for their storage.
I don’t have detailed information about how many PUT and LIST requests I chalk up a month, but this will most likely impact positively on me–I should be paying less, because most of my bandwidth costs are associated with serving up the images, an activity which doesn’t use a PUT or a LIST. Hard to say, though.
This is the risk you take when you use a centralized service: changes in terms of service. This is the main reason I avoid it–that and issues of reliability. Chances are, it’s still cheaper to host at S3 rather than locally, but we’ll see. Again, though, I’m small peanuts to the service.
