SoftLayer rejigged its cloud pricing

SoftLayer announced new pricing model it said would make the company more competitive among other cloud providers, in part by not charging for many of the networking costs.

“While other cloud providers advertise “low” prices for incomplete solutions, they neglect to mention extra charges for essential resources like network bandwidth, primary system storage, and support. At SoftLayer, our servers already include these necessary resources at no additional charge,” the company explained on its blog.

“Our new pricing model includes a redeveloped ordering and provisioning system that offers even more granular pricing for every SoftLayer bare metal and virtual server, from the processor to the RAM, storage, networking, security, and more.”

It also announced location-based pricing, meaning the company will uniquely price cloud services based on datacentre location.

Under the new cost model compute (dual Xeon ES-2620 4U processors) and storage costs dropped while RAM prices increased slightly – though the company said users can expect to save close to 40 per cent overall.

The latest round of cloud cost cutting follows similar moves from others to strip out fees and drop cloud service prices. AWS, Google and VMware have all adjusted their pricing downward in the past few months.