A couple of AWS news

Today, Amazon AWS announced a new pricing tier for EC2 instances.

If you commit to 1 year or 3 years, with prices $325 or $500 respectively, you'll get a small EC2 instance for as low as $49-$35/month. Compare that with the current $75 per month, and it sounds like a very good deal if you have a constant set of EC2 instances.

The other interesting announcement is already a couple of months old, the new Amazon S3 Requester Pays Model.

This model should allow companies like DropBox to offer a lower-priced service with zero storage, and the end user uses its own S3 key for storage and transfer costs.

If this is a good deal for the end-user remains to be seen. A $100/year service from Dropbox gives you 50Gb, a $92 cost with the current S3 pricing structure. Of course, most people will use less than 50Gb, so that difference reverts to Dropbox. But on the other hand, you don't pay any data transfer costs, the risk is on their side.

But at least in terms of clear ownership of the data, it is much more reasonable for my data to be under my own key.