Amazon Web Services Adds New Pricing Option

Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud computing service, has announced it has added a new pricing option for Amazon EC2 called Reserved Instances.

Reserved Instances extends the current on-demand pay-as-you-go pricing by giving customers an option to make a one-time payment to reserve capacity and reduce hourly charges.

After the one- time payment, the instance is reserved enabling customers to only pay for the compute capacity they use, and if they don’t use an instance they will not pay usage charges on it. Reserved Instances are available in 1-year or 3-year terms.

"Customers of all sizes enjoy the pay-as-you-go flexibility of Amazon EC2, but many have told us they are ready to reserve capacity in order to achieve even lower costs," said Peter De Santis, General Manager of Amazon EC2.

"Now customers can choose to reserve capacity as if they owned the hardware, but unlike traditional infrastructure, with Reserved Instances, customers do not pay to maintain and operate idle hardware, and instead pay usage charges only when actually utilizing the instances."