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Amazon Web Services lowered the prices for reserved instance virtual server. The option is by far their most inexpensive one and they proved that... Amazon Web Services Offer Lower Prices to Linux Users

Amazon Web Services lowered the prices for reserved instance virtual server. The option is by far their most inexpensive one and they proved that by exercising their liberty and slashing prices by over 25%. What this means for those who want to run reserved instance servers is that they can save up to 65% of the cost they would otherwise incur. The lower prices are exclusive to servers hosted on the AWS EC2 infrastructure and will cost only $0.034 an hour.

Amazon Web Services Offer Lower Prices to Linux Users

Interestingly, this means that Linux users are getting a better deal than ones using Windows. They will find it considerably cheaper to host their servers on EC2. It is no secret that Amazon views Windows Azure as competition and this move attempts to drive users away from Microsoft towards Linux. Currently, it costs you around $0.06 per hour to use a Windows-based server. Also, you have to make a payment of $69 upfront.

Compared to that, Amazon is offering Linux users a price of $0.034 per hour with an upfront payment of $61. To avail this price, the users have to be using the M1 standard virtual server. The server has a CPU akin to that of the 2006 version of the Xeon processor and a 1.7 GB memory. When compared with a Windows server of the same size and configuration, the cost per hour gets slashed by 65%. Linux users using newer models or heavier servers would have to pay more to use the services.

Amazon Web Services has ensured the users sign up for longer deals and packages. The longer the deal continues, the cheaper will be the rate per hour for the servers. The prices mentioned above are for a standard one year deal you can sign up for. If you extend the deal to three years, you can get a price of $0.027 provided you are using Linux/Unix. The upfront payment is higher, at $96, but when compared with the one-year price of $61 it is economical.

On the other hand, for a Windows server, you have to make an upfront payment of $106.30 and you get a rate of $0.051. As you can see, the rate prescribed by Amazon for Linux users is nearly half that for a three year deal charged by Windows. The great thing about signing up for Amazon Web Services for Linux users is that they can use any OS or version of the open-source platform they want, including Oracle Linux, Ubuntu, Cent OS, Red Hat Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise.

The price cuts have also been applied to larger servers, especially second-generation ones. The 27% reduction means you can get the reserved instance virtual server for $0.299 an hour with an upfront payment of $517. There are further price reductions you can find out about from the official Amazon Web Services website. In all, this is the 26th in a series of price cuts introduced by Amazon. The company had promised they would lower their prices and they are fulfilling it big time.

[Image via e27]