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Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

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Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#41

Post by dediserv »

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.

There are lots of other options. While they may not all be "cloud" providers, there is a wealth of VPS and dedicated server providers in almost all countries you can name.

I have no idea why you are picking on Hetzner in particular. They offer clearly defined bandwidth packages with their servers (20-50 TB) and charge for overages (0.2 cents per GB).

Hetzner is perhaps not what you would call a premium provider, but their prices are about in line with industry wholesale rates. For example a very high quality provider that competes with Hetzner in their home market charge 0.4 cents per GB and they are happy to deliver any traffic you can serve at that price point.

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#43

Post by frade33 »

dekhn wrote: post #18
frade33 wrote: post #9

Much expected after the GDrive prices got slashed. 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. 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?

Gdrive is not a competitor to S3. Google Cloud Storage is.

I should have made it clear, thanks for pointing it out. I guess this was in the wake of Google Cloud Platform pricing going down yesterday?

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#44

Post by eli »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #6
mkempe wrote: post #4

Key quote: "We are lowering S3 storage prices by 36% to 65%, effective April 1st, 2014." http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

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.

300% is still 300%.

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#45

Post by frade33 »

ianburrell wrote: post #30
frade33 wrote: post #9

Much expected after the GDrive prices got slashed. 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. 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?

There is Amazon Cloud Drive which is the consumer focused storage which is similar to Dropbox and Google Drive. It has a sync app. The prices for Cloud Drive haven't been cut; they are still $0.04/GB/mo.

thanks.

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#46

Post by brianwawok »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #32
copergi wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What if you have 100 TB?

I would quibble over 25k a year..

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#47

Post by balls187 »

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.

While not the best solution, you can call Amazon, speak to someone to have your "surprise" bill mitigated.

This is 1st hand information from a AWS Rep I once dated.

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#48

Post by opendais »

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

It might have been enough for them to keep investor interest [new round of funding] and continue. It wouldn't have put them in the black.

https://github.com/everpix/Everpix-Intelligence/blob/master/...

From that, it looks like their loss over 26 months was ~$300,000. Their total AWS costs was less than $400,000 over the same period.

Downloading 1 GB = 4x the cost of the S3 storage at the reduced prices. If everything is viewed once [doubtful], that is 4x the price of the S3 storage. Given that ti would be impossible to reduce the total cost by even 50%, let alone the 75% they'd need to break approximately even.

I didn't see S3 broken out specifically anywhere which is why I'm just making an educated guess. :/

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#49

Post by carlosdp »

chimeracoder wrote: post #29
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.

This is very hard for them to do. For example, what if you have set up a bunch of auto-scaling instances to handle heavy load. During the middle of the night, your application suddenly goes viral in Indonesia or Brazil or some other large country in a different timezone from yours. Your bill goes over its threshold - what does Amazon do? Do they terminate some of your instances (potentially losing production data!)?…

Yea any intelligent bill limiting needs to be done with context into what each instance is doing. It's possible for them to implement something that can handle that, using tags and such, but I would rather they spent that time improving reliability infrastructure.

It's not terribly difficult to implement one's own bill limiting system using the API.

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