Amazon Drops Price Of EC2 Dedicated Instances By Up To 80%

Amazon today announced that it is dropping the prices of dedicated instances on its EC2 cloud computing platform by up to 80%. Dedicated per region fees, which are charged on top of the regular EC2 fees, will now set developers back $2 per hour instead of $10, for example. That’s a large price cut, even by Amazon’s standards – and the company has a long history of lowering the prices of its cloud computing services. Today’s price reduction, Amazon says, is an example of its “tradition of exploring ways to reduce costs and passing on the savings to our customers.” The new prices will be take effect on July 1 and will apply to all supported instance types and AWS regions.

Dedicated instances are different from regular EC2 instances, as they run on single-tenant hardware that is dedicated to just a single customer. These instances, the company says, “are ideal for workloads where corporate policies or industry regulations require that your EC2 instances be isolated from instances that belong to other customers at the host hardware level.”

Besides bringing down the region fee, Amazon is also dropping the price of dedicated on-demand instances – that is, instances that are paid by the hour without long-term contracts – by up to 37% (down from $0.840 to $0.528 for m1.xlarge instances in the U.S. East region, for example). Dedicated reserved instances with long-term commitments are also now significantly cheaper as Amazon reduced the price of the upfront fees for this service by 57%.

Today’s announcement followed a somewhat smaller price drop for regular EC2 instances in April. Back then, Amazon dropped prices for Windows On-Demand instances by up to 26%.