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Amazon, a pioneer in the cloud storage space four years ago, apparently has no intention of loosening the pressure it puts on the many competitors it has picked up since then.
The Seattle-based company on Nov. 1 reduced its prices by nearly 20 percent on its S3 (Simple Storage Service). It was the second time in two weeks that Amazon has announced a special cloud storage deal.
On Oct. 21, Amazon’s Web Services division announced that developers and businesses can now apply for a free EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) usage tier to use for a full year. The new tier can be used for S3 storage, Elastic Block Store, Elastic Load Balancing and AWS data transfer — or all four.
As of Nov. 1, S3 users in the United States, European Union and Asia-Pacific regions will be charged 19 percent less for monthly storage data they wish to store in the cloud, the company said.
In adding the free developer-oriented storage tier announced Oct. 21, Amazon also recalibrated its other pricing tiers by adding a new tier at 1TB of storage and deleting the 50TB-to-100TB tier in order to offer volume discounts to more users.
The new Amazon pricing per month is as follows: 1TB: 14 cents per GB (was 15 cents); next 49TB: 12.5 per GB (was 15); next 50TB: 11 per GB (was 14); next 400TB: 11 per GB (was 13); next 500TB: 9.5 per GB (was 10.5); next 4000 TB: 8 cents pr GB (no change); more than 5000TB: 5.5 per GB (no change).