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Google cuts Cloud Storage prices another 10% after Amazon S3 price cut
- recuter 14y agoOP is showing the old prices for Amazon. New prices: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing-effective-december-2012/ http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing-effective-december-2012/ Google went to $0.095 a few days ago. S3 went from $0.125 to $0.095 per gig. Google has undercut again by going to $0.085. I like this very much. Hey Amazon, I heard Google also called your mamma fat, are you just going to take it?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- wmf 14y agoGoogle responds to Amazon, but Amazon doesn't need to respond to Google.
- recuter 14y agoHey. HEY. HEY! We might switch, they don't know for sure, what? Ambiguity. Get with it. Amazon if you don't match the Google prices we all might switch. Whatchagonado.
- sliverstorm 14y agoYea, as best I know Amazon is the dominant player in this space, so they don't necessarily have to engage directly in price wars.
- bitcartel 14y agoI wonder if DreamHost will lower the price of DreamObjects (built on Ceph) which remains at $0.07, given that the gap between them and Google/Amazon has narrowed. http://dreamhost.com/cloud/dreamobjects/pricing/ http://dreamhost.com/cloud/dreamobjects/pricing/
- ck2 14y agoIt's not just narrowed, dreamobjects is only equal to S3 RRS, which is now 7.6 cents, so there is no gap. (dreamobjects only uses one datacenter with the data stored three times, it's not equal to regular S3)
- hosay123 14y agoAs if in reply to my comment yesterday, Google continues to validate its service not by competing on quality or feature distinction, but by throwing gobs of cash at it, as they have done every other 'successful' effort outside of core search and Gmail. Man, if only there was a single serious App Engine-compatible competitor, prices there would be at the sub-penny level by now given the fair value of that junk. Only it seems designed from the outset for this scenario to never occur, and so why would I trust my future forward compatibility to another of their cloud efforts (or the mercy of their customer support ethos)?
- lawdawg 14y agoChrome, Android, Maps, AdWords (or pretty much all their Ads products), YouTube, Analytics, Docs ... should I keep going?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jsankey 14y agoWhile I think the grandparent is understating Google's success, it's worth noting that in your list AdWords comes under search (to me, at least), and the only other item that wasn't born out of acquisition is Chrome. Of course this is a perfectly rational strategy for Google and in the case of, e.g. Android, what they've managed to do with it since acquisition is remarkable. It's just worth remembering a lot of the successes come from spotting a startup on the rise and snapping it up.
- magicalist 14y agoThis is a bit of a tangent, but at some point I find the "it was really an acquisition" thing becomes rather silly, as there is very little difference between hiring people specifically because of their experience and ideas in a product area and a startup of some people with experience and ideas but no actual product yet. Maps and Android definitely fall under that second group, as Where 2 essentially thought that web mapping was a good idea, but hadn't actually done it yet, and Android didn't release anything until two years after acquisition, let alone ship an actual phone (which came a year after that). There can be insight there (one great property of startups en masse is that they serve as a great experimental method for proving zanier ideas will work or market segments can exist if a product is made for them), but there does come a point where it's like saying Google's success in AI research is because they spotted AI researchers and snapped them up. Well...yeah, employees usually are hired for the job they were hired for. Regardless, the original poster's criteria was "Google continues to validate its service not by competing on quality or feature distinction, but by throwing gobs of cash at it", which I think the GP's examples clearly contradict, as all of them have continued to gain quality (for some people's definition of quality) and feature distinctiveness.
- jdelsman 14y agoOH NO SHE DIDNTTTTTT
- general_failure 14y agoThis is a great example of how competition is good for the customer.
- sologoub 14y agoReally like the DRA concept from google - same durability, but reduced availability. Comparing to reduced durability of Amazon RRS, it's a nice happy medium between the normal storage and Glacier.
- mtgx 14y agoGoogle is basically telling Amazon: "You do not want to play this price-cutting game with us". It's a great strategy from Google especially if they think they can match any move from Amazon in this way, and if they can sustain it for a long period of time. It's basically game theory, and at this point, Amazon would be smart to stop cutting prices just for the sake of out-competing Google on price. And if they do that, Google might also stop doing it, because as in game theory, they know continuing an aggressive price war in this manner is only going to hurt both of them, because they are both very resilient and they won't take each other out in this way anyway. Amazon, the market leader, trying to beat Google on price, would be like Coca-Cola trying to beat Pepsi on price, and racing to the bottom. Coca-Cola has learned a long time ago that it's okay if Pepsi is slightly cheaper. Same goes for Verizon and AT&T. I think they will both still continue to cut their prices at a regular time period, as hardware prices fall, but only for the sake of expanding the market and getting new classes of customers that otherwise wouldn't use their services, and not just to try and steal from each other.
- mlinsey 14y agoAmazon is much more accustomed to operating a low-margin business than Google or Microsoft. Google's overall profitability can allow it to take bigger losses and subsidize its cloud services division if it wants to, but at some point, executives have to wonder if that's the most strategic use of those resources. It's also not always the case that the leader competes on quality while the followers compete on price. In many industries, being the leader means you have infrastructure advantages and nobody can touch you on price, whereas others must serve smaller markets based on quality. Retail (both online and offline) is a good example. You'd be foolish to suggest that Amazon (the retail side) or Wal-Mart give up competing on price and let their smaller competitors take that mantle.
- spdy 14y agoNoone on this planet can compete with Google on storage prices. I dont want to know how many petabytes of space they have laying around "just in case" another planet comes around and they have to index/mirror all the information.
- okrasz 14y agoSounds like a price war started between Google and Amazon. Good :) Hopefully other providers will join. BTW - you can compare cloud prices at http://www.cloudorado.com http://www.cloudorado.com
- ddorian43 14y agodo you know of a price comparison of s3 alternatives (not ec2)?
- dkroy 14y agoPrice wars this never ends well, where have I seen this before...?
- jordanthoms 14y agoYou mean always ends well?
- sliverstorm 14y agoNo, not always. A bitter race-to-the-bottom always seems to lead to feature cuts, reduction in quality, etc. It is for this reason I prefer a nice, friendly, slow price war. I guess you could say the kind of price war where it is in fact a product war- price is only one of the many battles being waged.
- dkroy 14y agoYeah that was my view on it, although I can see if they slow down a bit this can be good for the customer. This all just seems a little too quick.
- nfm 14y agoHow can they drop their prices by 30% and still make anything? I was under the impression that the margins for S3 and Cloud Storage weren't that high.
- saurik 14y agoGoogle makes virtually all of their money on advertisements: almost everything else (from phones to services) they seem to be willing to do at cost.
- notatoad 14y agoHardware costs drop over time. The servers they needed to power S3 cost more and required more power a couple years ago than they do now. It only makes sense that the price of the service continues to drop.
- kmfrk 14y agoI think they've wanted to make the margins on bandwidth for a while.
- tnuc 14y agoThe only people who will switch are people/companies with a lot of data where it may be cost effective. Most small developers will stay away from Google. Amazon offers a 12 month tier free. Google offers prices and terms that change with 30 days notice. The AWS conference is still on with Jeff Bezos talking in half an hour. Anyone care to guess what his response to this may be?
- hm8 14y agoWhatever happened to Google's Don't be evil! May be the effect died long back with all the law-suites against them. Just nitpicking but the author is adding percentages when they clearly should not be.
- ars 14y agoHow is that evil? You are right about the percentages though. 20% + 10% = 32% not 30%. They actually cut a further 8.3%.
- strumbringer 14y agoIf you look at the actual old and new prices, it actually could be over 30% depending on how much you use.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- dudus 14y agoCan Google Cloud Storage be used to just store personal Backups? Getting started with the service it seems that it's really targeted to developers. Why can't Google build an interface and offer it as a backup solution. Maybe that would compete with their other offer of Buying Google Drive storage for five times the price.
- wmf 14y agoThere are a variety of third-party backup apps. Many of them only support S3 and sometimes Rackspace, but they may add Google support now that it's cheaper. See http://gladinet.blogspot.com/2011/11/google-has-been-providing-cloud-storage.html http://gladinet.blogspot.com/2011/11/google-has-been-providi... http://www.zmanda.com/backup-google-cloud-storage.html http://www.zmanda.com/backup-google-cloud-storage.html
- Nux 14y agoIf they had balls they'd make it FREE!!!1
- fiendsan 14y agothey did and then they shut it down :\
- meritt 14y agoAmazon responds to Google by not shutting down successful new services and alienating users.
- ceph_ 14y agoWhat free services has amazon ever provided?
- meritt 14y agoIs this comment based on the assumption that because users do not pay for most of Google's services, they should have zero expectations about the availability and longevity of said service? If so, let me approach this from the reverse: A company creates a service to generate revenue. Google provides numerous free services from which they show advertisements (or crowdsource free labor such as the google voice training system or google image search tagging "game") to generate revenue. Another company might charge for said service but not flood me with advertisements. Both companies make revenue from their service offering. Why is it okay for Google to shutdown services (which either served their purpose or weren't profitable) but so unspeakable if another company were to do the same for a paid service? Regardless if you agree with that viewpoint or not, at the end of the day, Google has a long history of creating products, gaining users, and shutting down those products. This history has made it extremely difficult for them to break into a market such as this one because quite frankly nobody trusts that the product will be around very long. The utter lack of customer service also makes it difficult to place faith in their systems.
- adventured 14y agoI've found Amazon's freely available reviews to be an extraordinary resource over the years. I use them regularly when researching something I want to buy, due to the sheer scale of their retail operation there are almost always tons of reviews. People may take the accessibility of reviews for granted, but it's still a great free service. Amazon also previously had a free consumer-facing search engine, A9; along with a free maps / street view service. At various times Amazon has experimented with free shipping, including in general in the past, or with a free prime trial, or their free super saver shipping program. Obviously these are incentive based systems that require a purchase to use, but the shipping is still free non-the-less. They provide, if I recall correctly, around 5gb of free cloud storage for you to upload content to, with an Amazon account. They provide their Kindle book software across almost every platform at no cost.
- CurtHagenlocher 14y agoAre these prices for locally redundant storage or for georedundant storage? For reference, Azure's prices for those are 0.0931 and 0.125, respectively. I wonder if they'll be dropped as well in reaction to these changes.
- rsync 14y agoWe've been at 7.9 cents/GB[1], per month, for a few months now, and neither google nor amazon is responding to our price point. How odd! [1] http://www.rsync.net/products/pricing.html http://www.rsync.net/products/pricing.html
- Xylakant 14y agoYou're very much more expensive in the brackets below 10TB amazon takes around 10cent, you up to 24. Break even is in the bracket between 10 and 49 TB but after that amazon again undercuts you with 7cent/GB/month. With you I have to pay in advance and not by monthly usage - at least that's how I read your product page. Now there may or may not be other reasons to choose your service (data center in switzerland is appealing) but according to your pricing page, you're only cheaper in a very narrow window.
- frm1001xplrr 14y ago> Break even is in the bracket between 10 and 49 TB but after that amazon again undercuts you with 7cent/GB/month did, i mean did.. did you graph and solve that mentally while browsing the pricing page?
- Xylakant 14y agoNo need to graph. They both list the brackets and the prices.
- ddorian43 14y agoDreamhost and Constant are cheaper for example.
- frm1001xplrr 14y agoWelcome to Cloud Pricing a´la Oil Pricing The Confusement of Variable Pricing Throughout the Day Storage is King Datacenters are the New Parking Lots Computation is the Future Occupant
- frm1001xplrr 14y ago...unless Amazon matches Google and retorts "let's battle this out on agility, support, security, service"
- hayksaakian 14y agoHow easy is it to switch my usage to google from s3? Right now i have a rails app that uses carrierwave to manage images and store them on s3. All i needed to get s3 set up was two lines of config, a ruby gem, setting some heroku config variables to the api keys. How easy is it to switch?
- ck2 14y agoAt the same price, I'll go with the one that is the first to eliminate any charges for get/put requests. For public hosting of many smaller objects those gets add up fast.
- drawkbox 14y agoAnd thus begins the market exchange of bandwidth/storage. This is nice because it also helps make it cheaper for startups and product development.