Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

aws.amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 189 posts

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#31

Post by imroot »

daviding wrote: post #25
damon_c wrote: post #7

This must be an incredible benefit to companies like Imgur or Dropbox where a significant portion of their costs must be S3 storage.

It must, but I assume once you get to a certain level of usage then an account manager / AWS gets you a slightly better than the publicly published deal. Is that the case? Also, I wonder if EC2 is up for a price tweak soon too? EDIT: Ah - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7475284

If you have a direct-billed account, and are spending more than 1,000/month, you'll get an automatic price break. At my current $DAYJOB, we're billing around $15-20K/month (depending on traffic) in Amazon Web Services charges, and I believe we're getting somewhere between a 10 and 25 percent price break.

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#32

Post by toomuchtodo »

copergi wrote: post #26
toomuchtodo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're storing massive amounts of data, no point in using Glacier now, as it's still $0.01/GB (vs $0.03/GB for standard durability). And wow. Hell of a price drop.

I don't think a few TB counts as "massive", and that still saves you over a grand a year. Why move backups to a 3x more expensive service, what's the upside?

Not having to wait 4-8 hours to access them. Also, pulling from S3 costs you nothing (if you're in EC2 or other AWS services). Glacier access costs can get expensive depending on the quantity of data you need to access in a short period of time:

"Glacier is designed with the expectation that retrievals are infrequent and unusual, and data will be stored for extended periods of time. You can retrieve up to 5% of your average monthly storage (pro-rated daily) for free each month. If you choose to retrieve more than this amount of data in a month, you are charged a retrieval fee starting at $0.01 per gigabyte. Learn more. In addition, there is a pro-rated charge of $0.03 per gigabyte for items deleted prior to 90 days."

http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/

To store 1TB for a year in S3 is now $368.64

To store 1TB in Glacier for a year is $122.88

We're quibbling over ~$250/year?

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#34

Post by seunosewa »

copergi wrote: post #24
TillE wrote: post #10

Storage is cheap, but data transfer out is still $0.12/GB, over 10x more expensive than other options.

What "other options"? You mean sketchy "free 9000 exabytes/month of bandwidth" low end hosting places like hetzner? Those are not alternatives to AWS or azure or google cloud. And those bandwidth costs do not reflect reality, they assume most people use almost none of that bandwidth. The bandwidth still costs the same, just the big users are getting the small users to pay for their bandwidth costs.

That doesn't change the fact that you pay much less for much more.

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#35

Post by phalgun_g »

thomaslangston wrote: post #8

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.

You can set up billing alerts which sends you alerts if your bill exceeds a value (set by you)

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#36

Post by chimeracoder »

copergi wrote: post #26
toomuchtodo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're storing massive amounts of data, no point in using Glacier now, as it's still $0.01/GB (vs $0.03/GB for standard durability). And wow. Hell of a price drop.

I don't think a few TB counts as "massive", and that still saves you over a grand a year. Why move backups to a 3x more expensive service, what's the upside?

Glacier's pricing is actually very difficult to calculate. If you only ever store data (and never retrieve it), it's easy, but the moment you need to start accessing it, the pricing is actually very difficult to calculate correctly:

> Unlike every other service Amazon provides, with Glacier you're not paying for your net usage throughout each month: Instead, you're paying for your peak hour — and once that peak hour has come and gone, you're still paying for that peak until the end of the month, no matter how low your usage might fall. [0]

Note: I still use Glacier for long-term backup, because that's the exact use case it's meant for. But it's important to be aware of that cost: if I ever need to retrieve that data, I know I need to do it very slowly (and carefully) to avoid racking up a massive bill.

[0] http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-09-04-thoughts-on-glaci...

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#37

Post by mkempe »

callmeed wrote: post #16

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). [1] https://github.com/everpix/Everpix-Intelligence

I had the same thought. Their last Amazon bill was $35k. I don't think saving $10-20k/month would have made a significant difference. They had many freemium users, and were not adding customers at a sufficiently high growth rate over the life of the company. They were trying to raise $5m.

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#38

Post by daviding »

jpeg_hero wrote: post #33

nice to see that "GovCloud" is 4x more expensive http://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/pricing/s3/ the $12,000 hammer reinvented!!

While I don't know it's x4 worth it, I can personally testify to how expensive anything FIPS 140 is to get done..

"Because the AWS GovCloud (US) Region is physically and logically accessible by US persons only and also supports FIPS 140-2 compliant end points, customers can manage more heavily regulated data in AWS while remaining compliant with federal requirements."

http://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#39

Post by sdesol »

mdasen wrote: post #12
TillE wrote: post #10

Storage is cheap, but data transfer out is still $0.12/GB, over 10x more expensive than other options.

Not to disagree, but what other options? Google and Rackspace charge the same. DreamObjects charges $0.05/GB in transfer, but still charges $0.05 for storage. Azure is still the same $0.12/GB. I don't disagree that $0.12/GB could be considered expensive, but S3's competitors seem to be charging the same.

I actually use DigitalOcean as a cheap download server for my product. $5 gets you 1TB, then its $0.02/GB
Post reply on HN