Amazon EC2 Price Reduction

We’re always looking for ways to make AWS an even better value for our customers. If you’ve been reading this blog for an extended period of time you know that we reduce prices on our services from time to time.

Effective September 1, 2010, we’ve reduced the On-Demand and Reserved Instance prices on the m2.2xlarge (High-Memory Double Extra Large) and the m2.4xlarge (High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large) by up to 19%.  If you have existing Reserved Instances your hourly usage rate will automatically be lowered to the new usage rate and your estimated bill will reflect these changes later this month.  As an example, the hourly cost for an m2.4xlarge instance running Linux/Unix in the us-east Region from $2.40 to $2.00. This price reduction means you can now run database, memcached, and other memory-intensive workloads at substantial savings. Here’s the full EC2 price list.

As a reminder, there are many different ways to optimize your costs. When compared to On-Demand instances, Reserved Instances enable you to reduce your overall instance costs by up to 56%.  You pay a low, one-time fee to reserve an instance for a one or three year period. You can then run that instance whenever you want, at a greatly reduced hourly rate.

For background processing and other jobs where you have flexibility in when they run, you can also use Spot Instances by placing a bid for unused capacity. You job will run as long as your bid is higher than the current spot price.

— Jeff;