Lower Pricing for Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances

Our customers are putting the Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances to use in many different ways. Here are some of the usage patterns that they’ve told us about:

• Steady State Usage – These customers have applications which require a fixed number of servers to be available at all times. Reserved Instances are advantageous for customers who are currently using their own hardware or who are using On-Demand instances full-time.
• Low to Medium Annual Utilization – These customers have applications which run less than 100% of the time. The breakeven point can be calculated based on anticipated instance usage at the effective hourly rate. Reserved Instances offer a cost savings over On-Demand instances even at relatively low utilization rates.
• Variable Usage – These customers have applications with unpredictable or fluctuating usage patterns. They can use a combination of Reserved and On-Demand instances to minimize their net costs. This is especially valuable when EC2 instances are frequently launched and then terminated—we minimize costs by always charging the lowest applicable price for each instance.
• Standby Capacity – These customers use Reserved Instances as a reliable source of standby capacity with availability at a moment’s notice. The Reserved Instances are an integral part of their disaster recovery plan.

Given the many ways that our customers have already put them to use, I am happy to tell you that we’ve lowered the prices for newly purchased Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances! On a three year term, you can now get an m1.small instance for an effectively hourly rate of just $0.043 per hour (4.3 cents). The new pricing is now in effect.

Here are the new US prices (the instance prices for the EU have also been reduced):

You can purchase Reserved Instances from the AWS Management Console:

Or through ElasticFox:

— Jeff;

* – The Effective Hourly Rate is computed based on full-time (24×7) usage.