Cloud storage giant Amazon cuts S3 prices, waits for rivals to die Amazon is dropping its storage prices again, gambling it can lower prices to levels where it can be profitable but its competitors lose money and give up. Generally it is agreed that Amazon leads in offering cloud services with companies like Google (see news yesterday) and Microsoft, with its Azure offering, some distance …
Why doesn't Amazon just sue everyone else in the marketplace for violating patents! :)
Come to think of it, I am sure there is some old timeshare shop whose IP is now ensconced in IBM or some tiny survivor that can take EVERYONE ELSE in the IaaS space to court!!
Well, until the lawyers arrive, bravo to Amazon and Google for competing in the marketplace.
...what's expensive, not the storage - unless you are just continuously adding small amount of data to your online repo (eg incremental backup.)
A 50/50 SLA-backed commercial-grade internet service here in NYC is anywhere between $1300 and $2000+ (tier-1 redundant fiber) per month - if you calculate your S3/Google/Rackspace/etc storage cost it's next to nothing when compared to your bandwidth bill...
We need MUCH faster internet and we need it yesterday. Enough of the grip of the quasi-monopolies (cable companies, telcos), bring in the regulatory guns and unlock the power of competition a leveled playfield provides.
We've seen this before around the market for business internet connections and even low-end mass web hosting, service providers, be they cloud or network, are playing a utility game. A big asset, paid for by long term debt, carefully sliced for maximum yield, costs diluted with economies of scale and oversubscription. Theres a nice little piece about building a successful cloud operating model (and why VMware still doesn't seem to grasp this market) over at the 360 blog:
http://360is.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/why-vmware-still-wont-convince-cloud.html
There's a reason why Amazon are running a free open-source hypervisor, the cloud competitors running VMware are about to figure it out the hard way.
AG.
I remain slightly confused about the cost of this hosting vs the "consumer" level stuff available.
For example, Box.net (no affiliation) current pricing -
https://www.box.com/pricing/
- is $15 per month for 1000 GB (per user).
Storing even half that, 500 GB, would cost $62.50 per month with S3 or Google Storage. $125 for the full 1000 GB.
I appreciate that it's per-user with Box, and that the S3 architecture is more sophisticated and feature-full, but for small set-ups or private use just needing somewhere to dump backups, it's not much of a comparison is it?
Even Google Drive plans are $20 for 400 GB or $50 for 1000 GB. Is Drive really so much inferior to Google's "Cloud Storage"?
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