Amazon matches Azure free inbound data offer

Amazon Web Services has offered customers free inbound data transfer in an effort to compete with a similar offer by Microsoft's Azure service.

“Effective July 1, 2011, customers will not pay for any inbound data transfer,” Amazon announced on its web services blog on Thursday. 

The price cut applied to inbound data transfers to all regions, the company said. 

Earlier this week, Microsoft promised free transfers from July 1 for inbound data to its Azure cloud service, in particular for customers interested in large scale data migrations. 

It is not the first time Amazon has felt compelled to offer free inbound data transfers. The company killed its free inbound data offer last October and replaced it a with a free micro Linux instance that would only attract charges if the application became popular.   

But competition from Microsoft has compelled Amazon to bring back the initiative.

Amazon's revived free inbound offer also came with a promise that the cloud computing pioneer was “slashing" prices for a range of outbound data transfers, applicable only to its US and European infrastructure.

Customers with outbound data up to 10 terabytes would see their fees fall from 15 cents to 12 cents a gigabyte, with continued two to three cent per GB reductions up to one petabyte, at which point it asks customers to contact them. 

“If you were transferring 10 TB in and 10 TB out a month, you will save 52 percent with the new pricing,” according to Amazon. 

Amazon was also cutting prices on its content delivery network, which it claimed could deliver savings of 43 percent on current costs.

Amazon.com chief technology officer, Werner Vogels claimed the price drop had nothing to do with Microsoft's offer, but rather "scale-driven efficiencies".

"Often we think about innovation as going after new unchartered territories, but it is also important to innovate in those existing dimensions that will remain important for customers," he wrote.