Amazon S3: New pricing model
I’m getting emails about Amazon’s new S3 pricing model, so I guess the news is out. 
For us, this is great. We’ll save money right off the top (we upload a lot, so $0.10/GB uploaded vs $0.20/GB uploaded is a big deal) first of all, and secondly, they finally have tiered download transfer costs. This is a big one for us, because we buy enough bandwidth that $0.20/GB wasn’t cost-effective enough for us.
I’m going to have to run some numbers (I’m at MIX right now) to see if it’s now good enough for us to start serving more content out of S3 or not, but even if it’s still not perfect for us, it’s a major move in the right direction.
Finally, this illustrates a subtle but important point of using S3. When I buy physical disks at SmugMug, those are sunk costs. They’ll never get cheaper because I’ve already paid for them. At Amazon, though, market forces and changes will cause their pricing model to continue to re-adjust downwards. As disks get cheaper, that $0.15/GB/month fee will drop. And instantly all of your storage magically gets cheaper, no sunk costs to worry about.
That happened today, and I’m sure it’ll happen over and over again as storage & bandwidth both get cheaper and Amazon is able to leverage their scale to get better deals. The more people use S3, the more Amazon can drive prices down.
Since we were already saving a ton of money using S3, this is music to my ears.
