Amazon Cuts Data Transfer Prices on EC2 and S3

Amazon (AMZN) has lowered prices for data transfer on its utility computing services (link via James Hamilton). That includes a new pricing tier for the heaviest users of Amazon Web Services (AWS) with data transfer of more than 150 terabytes a month, who will pay just 10 cents per GB of outbound transfer, compared to 17 cents for those with less than 10 terabytes. The new rates take effect May 1.

"The result of this pricing change is that all customers will see a reduction in the price of transfer out," Amazon said in its announcement. "For example, a customer transferring 50TB a month will save 16% and a customer transferring 500TB a month will save 26% on transfer with the new pricing."

That 26 percent savings is bound to get the attention of large users who have been considering Amazon's platform. TechCrunch recently reported that Amazon's largest users are now banks and pharmaceutical companies, rather than startups. Amazon has stepped up its effort to win enterprise customers in recent months, first offering a service level agreement (SLA) for S3 and more recently static IP addresses, availability zones and persistent storage on EC2

Amazon said today that in the first quarter it added 35,000 new users to its utility computing services, which now serve 370,000 developers.