Amazon.com has announced some changes to the way the S3 storage service will be priced, starting June 1st. All Jungle Disk users with S3 accounts should get an e-mail from Amazon detailing the change. They’ve also posted the updated pricing on their site.

We’re still evaluating the full effect this will have on Jungle Disk users. The base storage rate has not changed - it is still only $0.15/GB per month. Amazon has reduced the upload bandwidth price to only $0.10/GB, which will provide a significant savings to many Jungle Disk users, especially those uploading large files. Download pricing has also been slightly reduced from $0.20/GB to $0.18/GB.

They have added some new charges for individual requests however. Specifically, they are going to be charging $0.01 per 1000 PUT or LIST requests and $0.01 per 10000 GET or HEAD requests. Jungle Disk uses its cache to significantly reduce the number of LIST requests required, however it does use PUT and HEAD requests on directory objects to make sure the cache is up to date.

For existing Jungle Disk users it is possible, although somewhat complicated, to see how this would affect your bill (based on past usage).

1. Select the “S3 Account Activity Report” from the Jungle Disk Help menu
2. Click the “usage report” link under the S3 service
3. Select a time period (E.g. April 1-30 2007)
4. Download the CSV report and open in Excel
5. Sort by UsageType, then Operation
6. Add the PutObject/DataTransfer-Bytes values, divide by 1,000,000,000 and multiple by $0.10 - this is the amount you would save due to lower transfer costs
7. Add the GetObject/Request and HeadObject/Request values, divide by 10,000 and multiply by $0.01 - this is the additional amount you’ll pay for Get and Head requests
8. Add the ListBucket/Request and PutObject/Request values, divide by 1,000 and multiply by $0.01 - this is the additional amount you’ll pay for List and Put requests.

I went ahead and did this for my personal account on my home computer and actually saw a net reduction of about 10% on my bill.

 Even though many users will see a decrease in their bill, this change makes it significantly more difficult for users to tell at a glance how much they’ll be paying. We’re looking to see if anything can be done to simplify this for Jungle Disk users. We’ll also be looking at optimizing Jungle Disk where possible to reduce the number of PUT requests used, since this is likely the place most users would see an increase in cost (if any).