Amazon To Combine Cloud Bandwidth Fees
Just a month after slashing its outbound data transfer pricing, the cloud powerhouse is combining its bandwidth fees across most of its AWS offerings, a move that could ultimately benefit users.
According to Amazon, the consolidated fee structure will kick in on Thursday April 1.
"We'll add up the bandwidth you use for Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS, and the Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) on a region-by-region basis and use that value to set your bandwidth tier for each region," Amazon wrote in a blog post announcing the bandwidth fee consolidation.
Depending on the amount of bandwidth used, Amazon said most customers will see a reduction in their overall bandwidth charge, since users can reach higher volume tiers more quickly by using multiple services. With Amazon Web Service's pricing scheme, the price per GB of outbound data transferred decreases as the amount of bandwidth used increases. Combining the fees of each service should lower the cost per GB.
On top of the fee consolidation, Amazon offers the first gigabyte of outbound data transfer free each month. Along with the free 1 GB per month, Amazon offers the first 10 TB per month at 15 cents per GB, the next 40 TB per month at 11 cents per GB, the next 100 TB per month at 9 cents per GB and for 150 TBs or more per month each GB runs 8 cents.
The consolidation of fees between services comes after Amazon slashed the cost of outbound data transfers in February by two cents per GB across all of its services.
"We are constantly working to drive our costs down and become more operationally efficient," Amazon's Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post at the time. "We then pass on those cost savings to our customers in the form of lower prices."
All inbound data transfers through Amazon Web Services are free through June 30, 2010. At that time the price will jump to 10 cents per GB.