Amazon has recently released that their prices for their web services are going to be changing on June 1.  Is it cheaper?

For Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), it definitely is.  The AMI instance rates have stayed the same at 10 cents per hour, rounded up.  However, bandwidth fees have dropped and are now on a tiered basis.  The bandwidth costs are the same across all of the services and bandwidth between EC2 and S3 (Simple Storage Service) is still free.

For Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service), the costs have remained basically the same, with the exception of the bandwidth changes. This should also cause, if anything, a reduction in fees for SQS users, although not by much.

However, for Amazon S3, the cost structure has changed.  No longer is there just storage and bandwidth costs.  There are now separate fees for PUT and LIST requests and another separate fee for GET requests.  The storage pricing has also remained the same at 10 cents per month  per gigabyte.  However, now, each 1,000 PUT or LIST requests will cost an additional penny and every 10,000 GET requests will cost a penny.  That doesn't sound like much, but for very high volume but very small data, the costs could go up. They also specifically do not say that this is free for EC2 users.  The impact of that is that trying to use S3 as a database of sorts for small bits of data could get much more expensive.

Amazon says this about the price changes to S3:

To quantify the impact of these pricing changes, we looked at what the effect would have been on customers' March 2007 bills. Assuming this change was in effect, 75% of customers would have seen their bill decrease, while an additional 11% would have seen an increase of less than 10%. Only 14% of customers would have experienced an increase of greater than 10%.

So that does mean one in every four users of S3 will see a rate increase.  Now, that could also include users that are at the very low end.  Maybe some folks spend 25 cents a month and might now spend 30 cents a month because of rounding for transactions fees.  That's more than 10 percent, but it's all still pennies.

The bandwidth fees are were most of the costs have changed.  Upload and download bandwidth is now charged at a different rate.  Upload has been reduced to 10 cents per gigabyte, half of the original 20 cents per gigabyte per month.  This makes using S3 to back up data much cheaper.  It also reduces the cost of uploading new AMIs for EC2.  Download bandwidth is now tiered.  For bandwidth used up to 10 terabytes per month, the cost is now 18 cents per gigabyte, down 10%.  The next 40 terabytes of data transferred will cost 16 cents per gigabyte, down 20%.  After that, bandwidth after the first 50 terabytes in a month is charged at a mere 13 cents per gigabyte per month.  That's a hefty 35% reduction.

So, a while back I looked at the cost of Amazon EC2 against a dedicated host.  In that writing, I had no examples of bandwidth in the double-digit terabyte range.  I was looking at it more from a personal point of view.  There, we saw that an AMI that used 40 gigabytes of storage and 100 gigabytes per month of transfer would cost about $99 per month.  Now, this cost would be reduced to $97 because the bandwidth would drop from $20 a month to $18 a month.  The initial upload for the 40 gigabytes would drop from $8 to only $4, as well.

Now, if you're a large user or have a very popular podcast and deal in the terabyte cost range, things may get much better.  If you were using a dedicated host at $119 like I am and had to pay 50 cents per gigabyte for transfers after the first 1500 gigabytes in a month, you'd spend about $35,119 a month for the hosting to use 71,500 gigabytes a month in bandwidth.  At a sustained rate of 222 Mbps, though, a standard 100 Mbps server won't be able to keep up.  Spread across 12 servers to have each at 20% of the Ethernet speeds, spread evenly 24 hours a day, you'd add another $1,400 to the cost each month and server complexity.

If, however, you hosted via Amazon EC2 with the files directly available off of S3, you'd likely only need a single EC2 to serve up the feeds.  To be safe, though, you'll use two of them at a cost of $146 per month.  Your first 10 TB of bandwidth will cost $1843.  Your next 40 TB will add $6553 per month.  The last 21.5 TB will cost an additional $2,862.  So far, were up to a total cost of $11,404 per month, or nearly $25k cheaper, so far. Now, don't forget about the S3 GET fees.  Every 10k downloads costs an additional penny.  Assuming your average data file size was 20 megabytes (a podcast, remember?), using 71.5 TB would be about 3,750,000 GET requests. That adds all of $3.74 a month.  Were you worried?  If you hosted your feed on S3, too, it might have 100 times as many requests as RSS readers check it every hour or less.  That could bring the costs up to hundreds of dollars.  But, as you can see, it would be cheaper to host that on the EC2 directly.

So, not only is AWS cheaper, but it's also much more flexible.  You could increase the bandwidth by 10x without having to add your own servers because the S3 system will just handle it (presumably).  That's very convenient.

Posted by Shane on May 4, 2007 8:51 AM | Permalink