Amazon tweaks S3 storage service pricing
Amazon in June will modify the pricing of its Simple Storage Service (S3) to take into account bandwidth costs.
The changes, which are set to go into effect June 1, will lower costs for 75 percent of the customers and cause an increase of over 10 percent compared to current costs for 14 percent of its customers, according to the company.
Introduced last year, S3 lets developers store application data on Amazon servers. Pricing is now set at 15 cents per gigabyte of storage per month and 20 cents per gigabyte of data transferred.
The changes lower the cost of storage to 15 cents per gigabyte-month of storage used. The new scheme also sets up tiered pricing for downloaded data and introduces a new cost for server requests over the Internet.
"Disaggregating request costs from data transfer costs allows us to offer lower bandwidth prices to all of our customers," according to Amazon's description of the price change.
It said it doesn't intend to make any other structural changes to pricing in the future.
Martin LaMonica is a senior writer for CNET's Green Tech blog. He started at CNET News in 2002, covering IT and Web development. Before that, he was executive editor at IT publication InfoWorld. E-mail Martin. 
