World Citizen Blog

Effective June 1, 2007, Amazon S3 service will change it’s pricing model, decreasing the bandwidth cost, and introducing charge for PUT/GET operations.

New bandwidth price (effective June 1, 2007)
$0.10 per GB - all data uploaded

$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data downloaded
$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data downloaded
$0.13 per GB - data downloaded / month over 50 TB
Data transferred between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 will remain free of charge

New request-based price (effective June 1, 2007)
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requests

Those are good and bad news. For those who host their web-site or small images to offset the bandwidth costs from their shared hosting, that is bad; for big guys who host video and photos, that is good.

If you think about it and read the Amazon S3 newsletter, you can clearly say that they are just trying to reduce the amount of small file hosting, because it stresses their system more then serving big files (and that’s try, small files require more connections/second, thus more CPU, if KeepALive is not enabled).

We made some calculations for a Small Guy and a Big Guy:
1) Small Guy usage pattern:
Average Visits per moth: 100,000
Average files per visit: 50 (html and images)
Average Gb per visit: 0.0001 (100,000Kb)
Total GETs: 5,000,000
Total BW used per month: 10Gb
New S3 cost: $6.80
Old S3 cost: $2.00

As you can see, the total cost is x3 time higher now then if we just pay $0.2/Gb, and not $0.18/Gb plus $0.01/10,000GETs. Now, if your site gets popular and you get 2,000,000 unique visitors per month then with the new pricing you would pay about $135 and with the old pricing you would pay only $60. Sad, isn’t it?

2) Big Guy usage pattern:
Average Visits per moth: 2,500,000
Average files per visit: 50 (html and images) + 3 videos
Average Gb per visit: 0.0001 (100,000Kb) + 0.09 (90 Mb, avg video is 30Mb)
Total GETs: 132,500,000
Total BW used per month: ~687,500 Tb (now $0.13/Gb)
New S3 cost: ~$90,000
Old S3 cost: ~$138,000

The Big Guy saves almost 50% on total costs, which is sweet.

Tags: amazon bandwidth s3

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Filed under: Enterprises, Amazon on May 1st, 2007 • 735 Views

Started March 15, 2007, the IKEA supermarkets would not give the plastic bags for free to their customers. Each bag will be charged for $0.05, and money will be sent to the American Forests conservation organization.

Those are great news, because some people will be forced to re-use bags, and not just throw them away. It’s mostly a psychological move, but a lot of people will re-use them. Similar step should reduce the plastic bag usage by 50%.

From my trips to Europe, I know that most of the European Supermarkets are already charging for the plastic bags since early 2003, thus the amount of trash on the streets was reduced as well (if you’ve paid money for a plastic bag, are you going to throw it away?! - another psychological trick).

Seems like the Swedish trade company is bringing the good habits overseas here - and I’m glad they do.

Tags: american forests environment ikea money plastic bags supermarkets

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Filed under: Green Environment, Enterprises on April 25th, 2007 • 46,198 Views

Just WOW. Google has an idea how to kill the competition on the ads market with the hands of its own clients… Brilliant! What will be next?!

They try to put some restrictions on the websites they do not own… How do you like if the town you are living in will order you to paint your house only in pink, and if you do not obey they will take it from you?

Implementing a mechanism like that, Google also opens a possibility for people to bury the competitors web-site by reporting their domain as a paid link, and I’m sure people WILL abuse it as well.

It’s kind of scary when one big company will be able to dictate how a web-site should be run, or what links should be placed… I think there should a better way to combat PageRank spammers, and give small guys an opportunity to mine some traffic by spreading their link on the friends’ blogs.

Tags: adwords google kill the competition restrictions

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Filed under: Google, Enterprises on April 19th, 2007 • 427 Views