Amazon Web Services ratcheted up the cloud price war again Tuesday when it cut new EC2 Reserved Instances running Linux/Unix, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server by up to 27% or up to 65% compared to On-Demand instances.
Amazon said in a blog that the new pricing applies to all three Reserved Instance models (Light, Medium and Heavy Utilization) for purchases made on or after March 5.
It suggested that customers review their Reserved Instance usage monthly and offered a few economical guidelines: If your server is running less than 15% of the time, use an On-Demand instance; if your server is running 15%-40% of the time, use a Light Utilization Reserved Instance; if your server is running 40%-80% of the time, use a Medium Utilization Reserved Instance; and if your server is running 80%-100% of the time, use a Heavy Utilization Reserved Instance.