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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has dramatically cut its rates for several types of data transfers, as well as changing how it prices reserved EC2 instances.
In a blog post published yesterday by Jeff Barr, AWS chief evangelist, the firm is reducing its rates for outbound data transfer, along with data transfer to and from CloudFront, AWS’ content delivery network. Data transfer from AWS to CloudFront is now free of charge.
Prices aren’t going down at the same rate across the board, however; outbound data transfer for the first 10 terabytes (TB) a month is being reduced by a quarter in the US and EU regions, and for the next 40 TB it’s at 6%, however in Asia Pacific these numbers see an increase up to 43%.
Customers in the Singapore region see the greatest benefits, seeing a 37% drop for the first 10TB a month, then 43% for the next 40TB, 37% for the following 100TB and 33% for the next 350TB. Prices for the first 10TB a month take effect after AWS’ free offering is consumed.
“As I have noted in the past, we focus on driving down our costs over time,” Barr wrote. “As we do this, we pass the savings along to you.”
Elsewhere, AWS has also simplified its reserved EC2 instances pricing, meaning customers looking to buy EC2 instances now have a choice of three payment options; all upfront, partial upfront and no upfront. Those who pay all upfront get the best effective hourly price when compared to on-demand, which is available for three years, while no upfront is only offered with a one year term.
Whether it’s storage or infrastructure, this is the latest update in cloud providers offering lower prices in the hope you will part with your hard earned cash. Microsoft announced free unlimited OneDrive to its Office 365 customers – meaning you get unlimited storage even if you have the lowest Office deal – while Google announced one terabyte of free Drive storage to every customer who buys a Chromebook in the holiday season.
You can take a look at the full AWS announcements here and here.