My concern is what it always been for AWS, no first party support for limiting my bill. The best effort from AWS is just an email notification when they "think" my bill is over a limit. If I can't limit my risk to a surprise bill of thousands of dollars after missing a midnight email, I still can't use their service at any usage based price other than free.
Key quote: "We are lowering S3 storage prices by 36% to 65%, effective April 1st, 2014."<p><a href="http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/" rel="nofollow">http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/</a>
It would be interesting to go back through the Everpix post mortem docs[1] and see if a big price swing like this could have put them in the black (or close to it).<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/everpix/Everpix-Intelligence" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/everpix/Everpix-Intelligence</a>
Given costs of storage and data center operations, what's the lowest, commoditization-bound on standard Amazon S3 prices? Now they're reducing to a narrow $27.50-30.00/TB-month, from the current $43-85/TB-month.<p>I've seen Internet Archive and Backblaze estimates that indicate $60-100/TB-storage installation and $7/TB-year in power. If drives last 5 years, we could expect a commodity cloud-storage price around $20/TB-year? One order of magnitude to go.
Now for those without context, that was to match Google Cloud Platform's aggressive offering they announced just yesterday. Now it's Windows Azure's turn I guess.
Much expected after the GDrive prices got slashed.<p>Currently I am only using S3 for hosting PDF or other big size files which are downloadable by the public, since the bandwidth is pay-as-go.<p>However for regular storage, Dropbox/GDrive are still the primary choice, due to the fact, the data sync across devices, speaking of sync, what is holding Amazon back from a similar app for S3?
This almost brings it down to where I can start backing things up onto S3. Currently my home NAS houses just under 500 GB's of stuff. My requirements to back this up offsite would be (1) full encryption of each file and filename using a key only I hold and (2) reasonable per-month price to where I cannot justify just buying another box with a bunch of drives and sticking them at a friend's house.<p>I believe I can solve the former with S3, though I still don't know of a turnkey solution. The latter is not quite there but this update brings it a lot closer. At this point it would cost me $15/month or $180/year. That's not terrible, but for that price I can easily have two 2TB WD Red drives. The box to house them would cost just a bit more since I need no horsepower, but just enough to run ZFS.<p>Glacier is a more attractive option, but the fact that the price is so complex when transferring data out of it, I'd be looking at taking months to restore everything just to not pay to dollar for it.
Is it reasonable to expect Paas service providers like Heroku and Engineyard also to cut their prices, or is it asking for too much? On one end, it seems logical to me because their services are built on top of AWS for the most part, on the other, I am not sure if this might happen since their selling point is not the Infrastructure underneath, but rather the convenience and ease of getting something up and running. I guess we'll just have to wait and watch.
nice to see that "GovCloud" is 4x more expensive<p><a href="http://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/pricing/s3/" rel="nofollow">http://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/pricing/s3/</a><p>the $12,000 hammer reinvented!!
I'd like to propose a new rule for Hacker News: only if you have built the thing you're saying someone should save money by building themselves, may you say the person should build that thing.
This is amazing news. I have a image gallery site with ~500,000 images. It currently costs me $39 a month and now I'll get to spend even less, no idea how they do it.
I hope these AWS pricing changes are not an early April Fool's joke. The S3 pricing in particular will be cheaper than the current pricing for the > 5000 TB tier.
It's pretty interesting that there have been no update to the Glacier prices as of yet. I wonder what could a fair point price be ~ 1 cent per TB ?