Amazon Hosted Storage: More Data, Lower Price

Amazon's Web services subsidiary, which operates Amazon Simple Storage Service, or S3, said it currently stores more than 29 billion objects, up from 22 billion at the end of this year's second quarter, and is processing 70,000 requests per second for storage space.

Amazon currently charges 15 cents per Gbyte, per month of storage space used. That price will hold for the first 50 Tbytes of data storage, but starting Nov. 1 Amazon will offer a tiered pricing structure that lowers the price for larger volumes of stored data. For storage between 50 and 100 Tbytes, Amazon will drop the price to 14 cents per Gbyte, per month, 13 cents for 100 to 500 Tbytes and 12 cents for more than 500 Tbytes.

Amazon also charges for data transfers, and six months ago announced a reduction in those costs. Amazon charges 10 cents per Gbyte for transferring data into Amazon S3 while prices for transferring data out start at 17 cents per Gbyte for the first 10 Tbytes per month and drop for larger data volumes.

Amazon S3 customers include National Geographic and e-mail archiving company Sonian. Last month Oracle announced Oracle Secure Backup Cloud is using Amazon S3 as a backup destination.