Pricing

# Amazon S3 Charges

People are using Amazon S3 for all kinds of stuff, with new ideas coming out all the time.

Backup and secure archiving are obvious. People also use it because it is probably the cheapest way of storing online-accessible data - it’s so cheap even Microsoft and Xerox are using it for a lot of their data storage requirements!

Various sites like SlideShare.com and some Flickr.com equivalents have discovered it’s cheaper to use Amazon S3 than store the data on their own online servers…

Amazon’s pricing is truly unbelievable and simply cannot be ignored as an option, in my opinion.

And of course it’s Amazon’s responsibility to back it up, keep it available 24/7 and provide the bandwidth to access it!

There are no up-front fees to pay, just a decent pay-as-you-go set of tariffs.

It is accessed as a web service, with the kind of response times you’d expect from Amazon’s infrastructure, so it is ideal for using in any size business when you want to share files and videos/audio in a real-time basis AND it will NOT crumple under HEAVY use!

You pay $0.15 per GB a month for storage in the U.S. data centers and $0.18 per GB a Month for storage in the European data centers. Data transfer is priced the same in the U.S. and in Europe.

Data transferred into Amazon S3 costs $0.10 per GB, while data transferred out of Amazon S3 costs $0.18 per GB for the first 10 TB (10,240 GB).

Volume discounts are automatically applied for additional data transferred out of Amazon S3; the next 40 TB cost $0.16 per GB and all additional data transferred out of Amazon S3 in a month costs $0.13 per GB.

Volume discounts are applied separately for the U.S. and for Europe.

There is also a small per-request charge that depends on the operation and the location of the servers you are accessing. PUT and LIST operations cost $0.01 per 1,000 requests, while all other operations cost $0.01 per 10,000 requests for buckets located in the U.S. PUT and LIST operations cost $0.012 per 1,000 requests, while all other operations cost $0.012 per 10,000 requests for buckets located in Europe.

There is NO charge you for DELETE requests or for requests that fail due to an internal error.

Your usage is measured to the nearest byte, and charges are rounded up to the nearest cent.

Charges Table – correct as of 5th November 2007

Amazon charge less where our costs are less, thus some prices vary across geographic regions and are based on the location of the bucket.

United States

Storage:

$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used
Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB - all data transfer in
$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Requests:

$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requests

Europe (Just announced so not supported yet in Data Bucket Pro)

Storage:

$0.18 per GB-Month of storage used
Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB - all data transfer in
$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Requests:

$0.012 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.012 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requests

Data transfer “in” and “out” refers to transfer into and out of Amazon S3.

Let us look at this information in a little more detail:

One PUT request is made when you upload one OBJECT, or update one object’s permissions, or change one BUCKET’S logging settings.

One LIST request is made when you list the BUCKET’s of an account, or list the OBJECTS in a BUCKET.

Therefore, for every 1,000 times you do one of those things, you get charged $0.01

One GET request is made every time you download an OBJECT, view an OBJECT’s permissions, view a BUCKET’s logging settings, etc.

For every 10,000 times you do one of these things, you get charged $0.01

Here is an example that may help:

You upload 20 videos, each of size 10 MB.

You will get charged for the upload bandwidth. You’ll get charged for the storage each month. And effectively you’ll get charged $0.000,02 for the PUT requests, and maybe $0.000,02 for a couple of LIST requests.

On the download end, say that 1,000 people download/view a 10 MB video. (That is 10 GB of data transfer). You will get charged $1.80 for the download bandwidth. You will effectively get charged $0.001 for 1,000 GET requests.

Important Point:
Now REMEMBER, unlike serving up this video from a cheap hosting account, EACH of the 1,000 viewers is getting a quality viewing experience… the only thing that is going to cause a buffering issue for them is THEIR connection to the Internet. NOT Amazon’s ability to serve up the data!

BUT, comparing Amazon S3, to a cheap hosting account is like comparing apples with oranges!

The Amazon S3 Calculator:

A bit of a techie tool but this may prove helpful:

http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html

The only additional cost is the one off purchase of our client, Data Bucket Pro, that enables access to the Amazon S3 web service. (Which comes with a great bonus, free life-time upgrades and professional support.)

Marc Liron

Kind regards

Marc Liron - Microsoft MVP

PS - If you have any questions, and they are not answered here, then drop us an email.