For those that store information on Amazon’s S3 cloud storage platform, good news, it is going to be a bit less expensive in the future to store things. Amazon has reduced pricing starting 1 February 2012 for the first 1PB of storage. Over the first PB, storage prices remain the same. Now with all of this said, it is quite expensive to use Amazon S3 as compared to many other services.Cost to store 1GB of data in Amazon S3 for one month
| Amount Stored | Old Pricing | New Pricing Starting Feb 1, 2012 |
| First 1TB | $0.140 | $0.125 |
| Next 49TB | $0.125 | $0.110 |
| Next 450TB | $0.110 | $0.095 |
| Next 500TB | $0.095 | $0.090 |
| Next 4000TB | $0.080 | $0.080 |
| Next 50000TB | $0.055 | $0.055 |
Thanks to Amazon for lowering prices in a time when hard drive prices are climbing quite a bit. For those thinking about it, if you are storing 1TB or more of data, it is about as expensive to purchase the raw drives for RAID 1 as it is to store things for one month on AWS S3. Still, for those running cloud backups or cloud applications, this should be some welcome news, and should save ServeTheHome.com less than $1/ month in operating costs but every bit helps! :-)
Jungledisk hasn’t reflected the price change yet :/
I’ve always wondered about their “Reduced redundancy storage” model, is it just missing an nth 9 in their 99.9% uptime SLA?
The problem with Amazon’s RRS is that it can lose files. If you can live with that because you have a local copy of everything you upload, or if this is a redundant copy, then you can save a couple of cents per GB. But if you are storing files and can’t afford to have them “go missing”, RRS is not for you.
Google also has a cheaper storage offering called DRA: Durable Reduced Availability. The difference is with DRA, they do not lose files. Your file may not be available when you want it because of some hardware failure on their end, but it will be available sometime. It’s about the same price reduction as RRS – a couple of cents per GB – but to me, DRA is actually usable while RRS could be a problem.