Just received an email from Amazon about the pricing change of Simple Storage Service. Instead of charging a flat rate of $0.20/GB uploading and downloading, “traffic cost” will be split into two from 1^st June onwards — a per request cost and bandwidth cost. It makes sense because not every gigabyte fetched costs the same for Amazon. 1,000 requests for 1Mb object will definitely be much more expensive than one single request for a 1Gb object.

Here is the relevant section in the email:

There are two primary costs associated with uploading and downloading files: the cost of the bandwidth itself, and the fixed cost of processing a request. Consistent with our cost-following pricing philosophy, we determined that the best solution for our customers, overall, is to equitably charge for the resources being used — and therefore disaggregate request costs from bandwidth costs.

So here is the pricing change:

Amazon claimed that it would actually be cheaper to 75% of Amazon’s S3 customers. However what Amazon did not disclose is what percentage of revenue does that 75% of customers generate? Maybe that 14% of customers who get 10+% price hike generate 50% of Amazon S3’s revenue?

The pricing change also favourites those who use S3 to store big objects to share publicly. However for those who use synchronisation software that performs lots of requests but upload only changed files, i.e. those who use S3 as offsite backups, they might not get a discount at all.

Is the pricing change good or bad?

Update: I also noticed that EC2 also has its bandwidth pricing changed after 1 June to be inline with S3’s pricing. As it does not involve a web server, that means there is no per-request charge!