Amazon S3 Latest in Cloud Storage's Falling Fees - Page 2

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An Amazon spokesperson said S3's SLA provides service credits to customers if monthly uptime falls below 99.9 percent in a given billing cycle. Amazon measures uptime by monitoring the service for internal server errors.

Amazon's two-year-old S3, which stands for "Simple Storage Service," initially targeted developers needing housing for big data chunks. As of February, there were 330,000 registered users.

It hasn't been all clear skies for the service, however, with occasional minor outages knocking S3 offline briefly. Users initially complained that the company had been slow to respond to the problem, prompting new efforts to improve communication during unexpected glitches.

Despite the hiccups, S3 is growing. Amazon said S3 currently stores 29 billion objects, up from 22 billion at the end of the second quarter in 2008. Activity, in the form of data service requests for storing, retrieving or deleting stored objects -- is also increasing. Oct. 1 proved to be S3's top transfer service day this year, with more than 70,000 requests per second.

More savings, considerations ahead

In addition to SLAs, additional services often come with data storage, such as security provisions and advanced management tools.

Storage price is not only tied to what it costs a vendor to store data, but the services it needs to put in place to help businesses meet their regulatory mandates, U.S. Data Vault's Shaffer added.

"That's why consumer storage is getting cheaper all the time, but businesses have a range of requirements and providers have to meet those needs -- and that goes beyond hardware costs," he said.

Even with prices dropping on online storage, insiders say there's no sign of the trend halting.

A few years back, 1 GB of U.S. Data Vault's RAM storage cost $300 to $400 a month, Shaffer said. That same service is now $39.95 monthly, and he said he expects that price to drop to $10 to $15 in the next year or two.

"What's driving the costs down is technology as we have better management tools and automation tools," he said, adding that just a few years ago an 8-megabyte USB flash drive cost about $100. Now, 4GB USB flash drives are routinely given away free at trade shows and conferences.

Another industry-watcher also said he sees prices continuing to decline for other reasons.

"In theory, it's possible for cloud-based offerings that are loss-leaders for larger initiatives to not only go to free, but even provide a rebate or incentive to users to gain more traction," Greg Schulz, senior analyst at StorageIO, told InternetNews.com.

"For providers who actually have to run a business as a non-loss-leader, you may see a la carte pricing, similar to what we are seeing with the airlines, where the base service is at a lower or reduced rate [and] then you get nickeled and dimed for add-on services," he said.

As Schultz noted, the various pricing approaches in data storage requires that business do some research.

"Enterprises should look beyond the cost per GB and look at what the fees for accessing bandwidth or fees for using different services," Schultz said. "Watch out for hidden fees and charges and look at the big picture, just as you would for regular storage."

For instance, in addition to storage costs, S3 users also pay for the amount of data they transfer. Amazon charges 10 cents for every GB transferred into the service, while prices for transferring data out of S3 start at 17 cents for the first 10 TB, decreasing as more data is sent.