This is fantastic. Amazon is <i>the</i> leader, and having them drop prices is a boon to the market as a whole. Companies who resell or add services on top of Amazon's services see an immediate benefit, as do their customers. I can't imagine how much money this saves companies like DropBox who build on top of it [<i>cperciva is right, it's exactly 15245/month, since they're in the 1PB+ range</i>].<p>I'm definitely wondering if and when we'll see 10 cents/gb - prices like that (minus the data transfer charges - see: <a href="http://www.nasuni.com/news/nasuni-blog/whats-the-cost-of-a-gb-in-the-cloud/" rel="nofollow">http://www.nasuni.com/news/nasuni-blog/whats-the-cost-of-a-g...</a>) put it within striking range of high availability spinning disk in your local data center.<p>Disclaimer: I work for a company building on top of/reselling S3 in addition to other providers.
What I have learned from building out the @Grooveshark infrastructure:<p>Their pricing on bandwidth is still 3x to 4x more than what it costs to buy transit above the 10Gbps level and still noticeably more expensive at the 1Gbps level. A 3 to 4 times increase in bandwidth means millions of extra dollars a year to run on AWS.
The size of the volume discount (up to 60%) is pretty surprising. If they're making any money at 5.5 cents/GB then they must be making a <i>lot</i> of money at 14 cents.
In the last couple of months they also created new 'Micro' EC2 instances, billed at 2-3 cents/hr. They also had a recent promotion to give annual access to a single Micro instance for free for a full year. It seems like price wars will be on the horizon for 2011. Great news for startups using EC2 (like myself).
They even dropped the reduced redundancy storage rate.<p>I wonder if with reduced redundancy and export to your own hardware (using Amazon's sneakernet) you can mimic the standard durability at a lower cost? Maybe too much work.