Today Amazon announced a significant price cut in its EC2 service offering. According to the release, the one-time fee for all Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances will now be 30% cheaper than previously offered.
The reserved instances program essentially allows users to make a one-time payment for instances, “reserving” them in order to receive discounts in subsequent hourly usage rates. The program was implemented earlier this year as an effort to reduce the cost of cloud services for frequent users, and with the announcement it appears that Amazon is looking to lure customers into long term service deals rather than intermittent monthly stints.
More from the short release here:
Starting today, we have lowered the one-time fee for all Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances by 30%. We continuously strive to be more efficient, and to pass cost savings on to you in the form of lower prices. With Linux Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances, you could reduce the cost of your instance usage by up to 56% compared to an On-Demand instance. When using Reserved Instances, you pay a low, one-time fee to guarantee capacity for each instance during a 1 or 3 years period. You then have the option to run that instance whenever you want, at a greatly reduced hourly rate. You can find more information about pricing on the EC2 Detail Page and Reserved Instances on the Reserved Instances Detail Page.