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Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014
- vlucas 13y agoApril fools!
- infecto 13y ago(mindblown)
- vlucas 13y agoMan, I guess nobody likes even a little humor around here.
- JNox64 13y agoI too, took some punishment for making a joke. HN is a dead serious place, I guess.
- mikeash 13y agoJokes are welcome, but they have to actually be funny.
- teemo_cute 13y agoBut jokes do have their place right? They brighten someones day, for example. I propose someone makes a subsection of Hacker News dedicated solely to jokes or funny stuff. Or someone create a new site... named.... Hacker-News-Chan?
- notwedtm 13y agoJust be happy that you didn't get hell banned because someone didn't like your joke. HN is worse than reddit sometimes.
- mkempe 13y agoKey quote: "We are lowering S3 storage prices by 36% to 65%, effective April 1st, 2014." http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
- toomuchtodo 13y agoUnless you're storing massive amounts of data, no point in using Glacier now, as it's still $0.01/GB (vs $0.03/GB for standard durability). And wow. Hell of a price drop.
- copergi 13y agoI don't think a few TB counts as "massive", and that still saves you over a grand a year. Why move backups to a 3x more expensive service, what's the upside?
- toomuchtodo 13y agoNot having to wait 4-8 hours to access them. Also, pulling from S3 costs you nothing (if you're in EC2 or other AWS services). Glacier access costs can get expensive depending on the quantity of data you need to access in a short period of time: "Glacier is designed with the expectation that retrievals are infrequent and unusual, and data will be stored for extended periods of time. You can retrieve up to 5% of your average monthly storage (pro-rated daily) for free each month. If you choose to retrieve more than this amount of data in a month, you are charged a retrieval fee starting at $0.01 per gigabyte. Learn more. In addition, there is a pro-rated charge of $0.03 per gigabyte for items deleted prior to 90 days." http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/pricing/ To store 1TB for a year in S3 is now $368.64 To store 1TB in Glacier for a year is $122.88 We're quibbling over ~$250/year?
- brianwawok 13y agoWhat if you have 100 TB? I would quibble over 25k a year..
- mkempe 13y agoGlacier storage cost isn't changing, just adding one decimal (extra zero).
- damon_c 13y agoThis must be an incredible benefit to companies like Imgur or Dropbox where a significant portion of their costs must be S3 storage.
- j_s 13y agoI wonder if any company using that much S3 space wouldn't have already negotiated a better deal, possibly beating these prices.
- daviding 13y agoIt must, but I assume once you get to a certain level of usage then an account manager / AWS gets you a slightly better than the publicly published deal. Is that the case? Also, I wonder if EC2 is up for a price tweak soon too? EDIT: Ah - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7475284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7475284
- driverdan 13y agoYes, the big users have negotiated lower prices that aren't listed on the site (confirmed to me by a very large S3 user).
- imroot 13y agoIf you have a direct-billed account, and are spending more than 1,000/month, you'll get an automatic price break. At my current $DAYJOB, we're billing around $15-20K/month (depending on traffic) in Amazon Web Services charges, and I believe we're getting somewhere between a 10 and 25 percent price break.
- Matsta 13y agoI remember reading a while ago that Imgur uses Edgecast as their CDN and not Cloudfront. See: http://readystate4.com/2012/08/14/great-post-on-imgurs-stack/ http://readystate4.com/2012/08/14/great-post-on-imgurs-stack... My guess is that they are only using AWS for serving the site and handling the uploads, resizing etc. and they are using another provider for the storage of the images (or they are just directly hosting everything with Edgecast and not using them in Pull mode). Like people have mentioned above, you can get a bunch of dedicated servers with heaps of storage for a fraction of the price of S3. You loose the flexibility and instant scaling, but the fact is these servers would be used more of a backup and would only be hit by Edgecast to upload them to the CDN.
- thomaslangston 13y agoMy concern is what it always been for AWS, no first party support for limiting my bill. The best effort from AWS is just an email notification when they "think" my bill is over a limit. If I can't limit my risk to a surprise bill of thousands of dollars after missing a midnight email, I still can't use their service at any usage based price other than free.
- chimeracoder 13y agoThis is very hard for them to do. For example, what if you have set up a bunch of auto-scaling instances to handle heavy load. During the middle of the night, your application suddenly goes viral in Indonesia or Brazil or some other large country in a different timezone from yours. Your bill goes over its threshold - what does Amazon do? Do they terminate some of your instances (potentially losing production data!)? The problem is that the exact times that "intelligent" bill-limiting features are likely to be used are the exact instances in which they could have absolutely disastrous impact if they make a mistake[0] I haven't experienced this myself, but I've heard Amazon is actually rather lenient when it comes to waiving fees for clear mistakes (accidentally provisioning an expensive instance that you didn't mean to) - their customer support is supposed to be very good, though I have not had to use this myself. [0] By "mistake", I mean that they are following your instructions correctly, but your instructions happen to be incorrect for handling this situation.
- carlosdp 13y agoYea any intelligent bill limiting needs to be done with context into what each instance is doing. It's possible for them to implement something that can handle that, using tags and such, but I would rather they spent that time improving reliability infrastructure. It's not terribly difficult to implement one's own bill limiting system using the API.
- Fasebook 13y agoIt seems impossible for a single solution here. One business would rather see instances go down, another might need ledger logs no matter what and would rather turn down customers at the door, etc., The right way to do it (currently) is to model the costs yourself and tie it in with your operational automation, then determine what your best course of action would be during a shitstorm. Generally, I would wager the best option is to replace your front page with a static html "overwhelming response" page, maybe with some light vector graphics.
- frade33 13y agoMuch expected after the GDrive prices got slashed. Currently I am only using S3 for hosting PDF or other big size files which are downloadable by the public, since the bandwidth is pay-as-go. However for regular storage, Dropbox/GDrive are still the primary choice, due to the fact, the data sync across devices, speaking of sync, what is holding Amazon back from a similar app for S3?
- dekhn 13y agoGdrive is not a competitor to S3. Google Cloud Storage is.
- frade33 13y agoI should have made it clear, thanks for pointing it out. I guess this was in the wake of Google Cloud Platform pricing going down yesterday?
- ianburrell 13y agoThere is Amazon Cloud Drive which is the consumer focused storage which is similar to Dropbox and Google Drive. It has a sync app. The prices for Cloud Drive haven't been cut; they are still $0.04/GB/mo.
- frade33 13y agothanks.
- TillE 13y agoStorage is cheap, but data transfer out is still $0.12/GB, over 10x more expensive than other options.
- mdasen 13y agoNot to disagree, but what other options? Google and Rackspace charge the same. DreamObjects charges $0.05/GB in transfer, but still charges $0.05 for storage. Azure is still the same $0.12/GB. I don't disagree that $0.12/GB could be considered expensive, but S3's competitors seem to be charging the same.
- sdesol 13y agoI actually use DigitalOcean as a cheap download server for my product. $5 gets you 1TB, then its $0.02/GB
- paulrosenzweig 13y agoHow much bandwidth are you using? I'd wonder if they throttle you at some point. I'm sure they're not expecting people to use that whole TB.
- icelancer 13y agoI use multiple instances (20-40) of 1 TB bandwidth pretty regularly with no throttling as of yet.
- sdesol 13y agoYeah I think they realize, like most vendors, that most people don't even come remotely close to using that much bandwidth. Even using them as a proxy for nextflix will probably just end up being 300G a month.
- DenisM 13y agoOn the other hand, S3 <-> EC2 transfer is free of bandwidth costs (there are still per-request costs though).
- programminggeek 13y agoNothing should ever be announced or "effective" April 1.
- freehunter 13y agoI'm set to move into a new apartment building that is opening April 1st. I'm still not entirely convinced that I'm actually going to get my keys...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- _wesley_ 13y agoI launched a company once on April 1. Realized the date after we'd announced to everyone. We were worried about it impacting launch (is this a joke?), but all was good.
- camillomiller 13y agoApple was founded on April 1st, 1976
- einhverfr 13y agoApril 1 is not celebrated everywhere in the world. I learned that April 1 jokes on the internet are often taken the wrong way even when there are ample reasons to realize it is a joke. See http://osdir.com/ml/finance.ledger.smb.devel/2008-04/msg00000.html http://osdir.com/ml/finance.ledger.smb.devel/2008-04/msg0000...
- ghshephard 13y agoThere is precedent around making big announcements on April 1st, with full understanding of the impact of announcing on that day: https://www.google.com/search?q=founding+date+apple&oq=founding+date+apple https://www.google.com/search?q=founding+date+apple&oq=found... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail
- callmeed 13y agoIt would be interesting to go back through the Everpix post mortem docs[1] and see if a big price swing like this could have put them in the black (or close to it). [1] https://github.com/everpix/Everpix-Intelligence https://github.com/everpix/Everpix-Intelligence
- mkempe 13y agoI had the same thought. Their last Amazon bill was $35k. I don't think saving $10-20k/month would have made a significant difference. They had many freemium users, and were not adding customers at a sufficiently high growth rate over the life of the company. They were trying to raise $5m.
- eldavido 13y agoThe importance of this depends on unit economics. For businesses with historically tight margins (e.g. retail), small swings in input prices (labor, cost of goods) can make or break profitability. Whereas software, if you're doing it right, should have much higher margins. Sidenote: I'd be very curious to know what the "typical SaaS business" has as its gross margin, factoring in all sales against "cost of goods": servers, bandwidth, operations, etc.
- opendais 13y ago80% seems to be the common 'educated guess' number: http://www.quora.com/What-should-be-the-typical-gross-margin-for-a-SaaS-startup http://www.quora.com/What-should-be-the-typical-gross-margin... http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics-2-definitions/ http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics-2-definitions/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2012/10/02/running-a-saas-business-answer-these-four-questions/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2012/10/02/running-a-saa...
- opendais 13y agoIt might have been enough for them to keep investor interest [new round of funding] and continue. It wouldn't have put them in the black. https://github.com/everpix/Everpix-Intelligence/blob/master/Financials.md https://github.com/everpix/Everpix-Intelligence/blob/master/... From that, it looks like their loss over 26 months was ~$300,000. Their total AWS costs was less than $400,000 over the same period. Downloading 1 GB = 4x the cost of the S3 storage at the reduced prices. If everything is viewed once [doubtful], that is 4x the price of the S3 storage. Given that ti would be impossible to reduce the total cost by even 50%, let alone the 75% they'd need to break approximately even. I didn't see S3 broken out specifically anywhere which is why I'm just making an educated guess. :/
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- mkempe 13y agoGiven costs of storage and data center operations, what's the lowest, commoditization-bound on standard Amazon S3 prices? Now they're reducing to a narrow $27.50-30.00/TB-month, from the current $43-85/TB-month. I've seen Internet Archive and Backblaze estimates that indicate $60-100/TB-storage installation and $7/TB-year in power. If drives last 5 years, we could expect a commodity cloud-storage price around $20/TB-year? One order of magnitude to go.
- ghoul2 13y agoa while back i wondered about the same thing ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2787770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2787770 ). It did occur later to me that S3/Google Cloud Storage and Archive/Backblaze are really not the same thing. S3/GCS is FAST. Backblaze, for example, has two gigabit ethernet ports for their new 180TB pod. That means, even assuming no overhead, copying 1 POD to another will take ~9 days! Even were they to add additional/faster ports/interconnects, the 45 drives in a POD are still sitting on a PCIe 2.0 8x, thus with a theoretical throughput of 4GB/s, thats still half a day. Now, I do not know how many drives Amazon/Google load into their S3/GCS servers, but my (dayjob) live storage servers rarely have more than 4 - 8 drives each. Even if we assume 8, thats a 5-6 fold increase in theoretical throughput - and THAT is why S3/GCS will never be in the same pricing zone as Backblaze. S3/GCS, even Backupsy, DO, etc are all "live" storage solutions, and seems most are converging to ~3 cents/GB-month. Backblaze is "archival" storage, and will (probably) continue to be cheaper by a factor of 5-10 (or its won't be worth the hassle).
- lnanek2 13y agoAmazon is well known for losing money to capture market anyway, so I wouldn't put break even as their limit.
- jpeg_hero 13y agonice to see that "GovCloud" is 4x more expensive http://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/pricing/s3/ http://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/pricing/s3/ the $12,000 hammer reinvented!!
- daviding 13y agoWhile I don't know it's x4 worth it, I can personally testify to how expensive anything FIPS 140 is to get done.. "Because the AWS GovCloud (US) Region is physically and logically accessible by US persons only and also supports FIPS 140-2 compliant end points, customers can manage more heavily regulated data in AWS while remaining compliant with federal requirements." http://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/ http://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/
- duskwuff 13y agoKeep in mind that this means they're operating one or more facilities exclusively for GovCloud. Since these facilities are almost certainly smaller than the rest (and, as you mentioned, they're more work than normal), it only stands to reason that it'd be more expensive to use.
- hatred 13y agoIt's pretty interesting that there have been no update to the Glacier prices as of yet. I wonder what could a fair point price be ~ 1 cent per TB ?
- 8_hours_ago 13y agoI hope this causes services such as Tarsnap to reduce their prices. Doing a full off-site backup, including pictures, is still pricey.
- MCarusi 13y agoWe picked a good time to start using AWS! Nothing but positive things so far.
- patrickxb 13y agoI wish the cost for PUT requests would drop.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoUnfortunately, PUTs are just more expensive computationally than reads. You could always use a caching layer and only put for persistance.
- mikelbring 13y agoIs it just the cost of storage that dropped? Bandwidth is still a major burden.
- aalpbalkan 13y agoNow for those without context, that was to match Google Cloud Platform's aggressive offering they announced just yesterday. Now it's Windows Azure's turn I guess.
- pkrumins 13y agoAm I reading this right that the new pricing is going to be 3 cents per GB and the old pricing was 8.5 cents per GB? 2.8x drop in price! Wow!
- atopuzov 13y agoNow I know why the soap in the toilets is not getting refiled.
- IgorPartola 13y agoThis almost brings it down to where I can start backing things up onto S3. Currently my home NAS houses just under 500 GB's of stuff. My requirements to back this up offsite would be (1) full encryption of each file and filename using a key only I hold and (2) reasonable per-month price to where I cannot justify just buying another box with a bunch of drives and sticking them at a friend's house. I believe I can solve the former with S3, though I still don't know of a turnkey solution. The latter is not quite there but this update brings it a lot closer. At this point it would cost me $15/month or $180/year. That's not terrible, but for that price I can easily have two 2TB WD Red drives. The box to house them would cost just a bit more since I need no horsepower, but just enough to run ZFS. Glacier is a more attractive option, but the fact that the price is so complex when transferring data out of it, I'd be looking at taking months to restore everything just to not pay to dollar for it.
- maximilian 13y agoCheck out git-annex (and the corresponding assistant). I haven't used it yet, but it supposedly supports S3 and glacier, and hard drives and will tell you where each file is backed up.
- IgorPartola 13y agoInteresting option. I might use this inside the LAN to manipulate the files on the NAS. The current setup is much simpler though: files that live in ZFS and incremental backups every day and every week.
- rmcpherson 13y agoCheck out CamliStore at http://camlistore.org/ http://camlistore.org/. It's far more than backup, but it accomplishes that as well and supports S3 as well as Google Cloud Storage.
- IgorPartola 13y agoVery interesting. I will check it out further, thanks.
- elwell 13y agoSame date as Google's cloud storage price changes.
- rpedela 13y agoI hope these AWS pricing changes are not an early April Fool's joke. The S3 pricing in particular will be cheaper than the current pricing for the > 5000 TB tier.
- Goranek 13y agoWaiting for Azure response, should be any minute now i suppose.
- neya 13y agoIs it reasonable to expect Paas service providers like Heroku and Engineyard also to cut their prices, or is it asking for too much? On one end, it seems logical to me because their services are built on top of AWS for the most part, on the other, I am not sure if this might happen since their selling point is not the Infrastructure underneath, but rather the convenience and ease of getting something up and running. I guess we'll just have to wait and watch.
- BHSPitMonkey 13y agoThe linked page is only describing a price change in S3, not all AWS services across the board (most of what you're doing with Heroku would be incurring EC2 costs).
- neya 13y agoThank you for the clarification, looks like I commented on the wrong thread xD
- thatthatis 13y agoAs an AWS consumer, I'd like to thank google's cloud team for making this announcement in early 2014 possible.
- volune 13y agoThanks Google!
- marktolson 13y agoThis is amazing news. I have a image gallery site with ~500,000 images. It currently costs me $39 a month and now I'll get to spend even less, no idea how they do it.
- tedchs 13y agoI'd like to propose a new rule for Hacker News: only if you have built the thing you're saying someone should save money by building themselves, may you say the person should build that thing.