Amazon Cuts Pricing on EC2 Dedicated Instances

In its latest round of price cuts, Amazon Web Services this week has reduced the cost of its EC2 Dedicated Instances by up to 80 percent.

Amazon introduced EC2 Dedicated Instances over two years ago. As the name implies, they run on hardware dedicated to a specific customer. The service is designed to let organizations create their own virtual private clouds.

The cloud provider added Dedication Instances at the time to address those customers who were unwilling or unable, due to regulatory or compliance issues, to run their data on multitenant shared instances.

The price cuts apply to dedicated per-region fees and per-instance On-Demand and Reserved Instance fees across all regions, explained AWS evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog post announcing the price cuts.

Under the new pricing plan, Amazon has cut the dedicated per-region fee by 80 percent from $10 to $2 in any "Region" where at least one dedicated instance type is running, according to Barr.

The company cut the hourly rate for its Dedicated On-Demand Instances by up to 37 percent. Barr said for an m1.xlarge Dedicated Instance in the U.S. East (Northern Virginia) Region, the price drops from $0.840 per hour to $0.528 per hour. And Amazon cut the price of Dedicated Reserved Instances by up to 57 percent. Barr said Dedicated Reserved Instances cost 65 percent less than Dedicated On-Demand Services.

The price reductions took effect July 1. Amazon customers can launch Dedicated Instances with the AWS Management Console by selecting a target virtual private cloud and Dedicated Tenancy Option when configuring an instance, according to Barr.

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 07/11/2013 at 12:49 PM