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).
- Select the “S3 Account Activity Report” from the Jungle Disk Help menu
- Click the “usage report” link under the S3 service
- Select a time period (E.g. April 1-30 2007)
- Download the CSV report and open in Excel
- Sort by UsageType, then Operation
- 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
- 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
- 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).
10 Comments
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Colin Henderson said,
May 1, 2007 @ 5:27 pm
Thanks JD for looking out for us. I can’t imagine why anyone would use anything other than JD and S3 for backups.
Alex said,
May 5, 2007 @ 12:40 am
Hi JD,
Any news on the Linux CLI client? Really looking forward to that.
Garth Kidd said,
May 5, 2007 @ 6:40 pm
The more you do to save round-trips to S3, the faster JungleDisk will seem. Those EC2 boxes look more and more useful every day, huh?
Around the web | alexking.org said,
May 6, 2007 @ 2:57 pm
[...] Amazon announces planned S3 pricing change – might my $.57/month bill spike to $.65/month? [...]
Jungle Dave said,
May 6, 2007 @ 3:45 pm
There will be a basic Linux CLI version in the next release.
ricobird said,
May 17, 2007 @ 8:44 pm
I know that we SHOULD backup. But for a newbie this system seems very complicated. Fees to JD, fees to Amazon, fees to store, fees to recover, S3 pricing, on and on! Can’t you simplify the whole storage system? For computer geeks, there is no problem! But, for the rest of us…OY VAY!!! I’ll pass until I can figure out your system!!!!
Willem said,
June 6, 2007 @ 12:39 pm
RICOBIRD:
There is no excuse for anybody concerned about backing up data not to try out JD/S3. It is VERY INEXPENSIVE to test uploading, storing and retrieving hundreds of files.
Over the past 4 months of my tests, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has charged me only about 11 cents a month. And I had about a gigabyte of data up there.
Once you see this in operation, you will appreciate how common sense and easy this is.
Chris said,
June 8, 2007 @ 1:48 pm
ricobird,
It’s not that complicated. And most of the blame for your confusion should fall on Amazon. This blog post is simply pointing out how Amazon now calculates your charges.
You pay (or will pay–it’s currently free) a small $20 fee to JungleDisk, the developer of the software. From there on out, all fees go to Amazon for the use of their S3 system, which provides the back end to JungleDisk.
Yes, Amazon has somewhat complicated the pricing structure for use of their system, but it’s still one bill (so no separate “fees to Amazon, fees to store, fees to recover, S3 pricing”–it’s all the same, and it’s all quite cheap; I’m paying about a buck a month and I’ve got something like 15GB on JD). JungleDave has made it about as simple as Amazon will allow.
However, I agree that for new people, the process of signing up for Amazon S3 and copying the account keys into JD is somewhat complicated; perhaps someday, JungleDave, you can simplify it for new people and handle account creation and billing for them (maybe making a small 2% markup for the convenience and leaving the option to use your own S3 account for those of us who are more familiar with these things).
As for me, I’m still waiting for ISPs to realize that there is a market for consumer-priced higher-speed upload connections (my ISP only offers anything faster than 384kbps to businesses willing to buy T1s or $400 cable modem connections) before I can fully utilize JD. Until then, I’m still looking at getting another external drive for backup and archival purposes…
Art said,
July 11, 2007 @ 3:00 pm
Any speculations regarding future S3 pricing? I’m backing up 122GB of family photos using Jungle disk right now – so this is not a theoretical question
Guess I’m trying to get a sense of possible future scale economies regarding grid storage……..
Jungle Dave said,
July 12, 2007 @ 7:22 am
I don’t expect any more changes in the near term. In the long term, I expect prices to come down as the storage itself gets cheaper and competition comes into the market.