AWS Price Reductions and Free Inbound Data Transfer

I guess they buy their bandwidth symmetrically. Thus, as long as they have more outgoing traffic they can charge for, giving incoming away for free doesn't really 'cost' them much (off-course the do lose income on this, but not real costs). It's still nice tho! :)

The free inbound transfer is NOT permanent. From the post:

"Finally, we are waiving the inbound data transfer fee across the board (for all services) through the end of June 2010."

It's nice, but let's not kid ourselves about its awesomeness.

Prediction: at the end of June, they'll magically realize that they can do this permanently and they fix the free inbound traffic, or at least have a healthy free amount before payment is started. This means there will be another round of news for them.

Just a friendly word of caution: such a huge price differential (0 cents in vs ~15 cents out per GB) is a kind of lockin.

It would be nice if they included PUT's into this equation too. Many large datasets are not one big file, but billions of smaller ones.

I realise it raises the offering out of the bandwidth arena and into actual server capacity to handle the PUT's, but offering free bandwidth in and still charging per PUT action is kinda misleading (and could really ruin someones day if they read it wrong)

Making inbound data transfer free really makes sense if they're charging you to store it and every time you access it.

i guess free inbound is cool if you're using S3 as just a huge backup dump for all of your stuff, but it would seem that running any sort of web app that serves as a public customer interface wouldn't benefit much at all from free inbound

At any reasonable scale, S3 bandwidth is still a magnitude more expensive than you would pay at an aggressive dedicated server company like ServerBeach, ThePlanet, 10tb.com, or SoftLayer. It's also even worse when you compare it to discount bandwidth offerings like Cogent's $1,500 for a GigE (which comes out to $0.0075/GB) or Hurricane Electric's $3k price for a GigE connection.

What Amazon is really doing here is the classic ISP inbound/outbound juggling act amongst public peers. In order to maintain a peering relationship, especially at the scales that Amazon must see with it's cloud services, providers really need to maintain an equitable inbound/outbound ratio, otherwise agreements become void and they actually start charging each other.

Free inbound transfer! Wow just as I was about to start using AWS. Thank you Jebus.