In light of the recent price drops from Microsoft and Amazon for cloud based storage services, it seems the battle for the cloud is nicely heating up. On Friday, Jan. 24, Amazon released a statement that it would be dropping costs of its Web services including its EBS and S3 cloud storage options. Microsoft did not take the announcement lying down and the company soon issued a statement saying that it would also be dropping the prices for its own web services.
While Amazon has a number of pricing schemes depending on the region in question, the company said that they would be cutting prices by up to 22 percent for their S3 storage services. While the price cuts start out at around 11 percent for the company's smallest 0 to 1TB option, customers who use more than 5,000 TB per month will be able to enjoy that maximum possible price drop at 22 percent. For the company's EBS (Elastic Block Store) option, prices were cut by as much as 50 percent. Customers who use Amazon Web Services will be able to enjoy the price cuts starting this Feb. 1.
"We are reducing the price for Amazon S3 storage in all Regions by up to 22%, with a proportionate reduction in the price of Reduced Redundancy Storage (RRS)," said Amazon in a blog post. "We are reducing prices for Elastic Block Store (EBS) Standard volume storage and I/O requests across all AWS Regions. The reductions vary by Region, and are as high as 50% in some locations."
In response to the Amazon price drop, Microsoft also announced its own round of price cuts for their Azure storage service. In addition to offering a 20 percent price drop, the company has also announced that the price reduction will be applicable to all regions. Amazon's recent offer differs depending on your region so your mileage may vary. With Microsoft however, the 20 percent price cut will be applied across all regions. Depending on the region in question, Microsoft may beat out Amazon's prices by as much as 10 percent providing customers with considerable savings.
"If you had concerns that Windows Azure was more expensive, we're putting those concerns to rest today," said Microsoft operations General Manager Steve Martin.
While this is certainly great news for Azure customers as well as customers who are contemplating to switch service providers, it will be a bit of a wait since the Microsoft price drops will come into effect on March 12, more than a month after the Amazon price drops take effect.
