Music to our ears: the big guys continue to create awareness of, and demand for, public cloud services.

Don’t just be a lemming, though — we encourage you to do your own homework and look before you leap into any cloud.

Our own AIS BusinessCloud1 has a number of significant advantages over the so-called cheap-and-cheerful offerings from the gorillas.

Don’t believe me? Read here.

Emphasis in red added by me. Original article from Justin Lee in The WHIR; picture courtesy of Anthony Weiner (just kidding).

Brian Wood, VP Marketing

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Amazon Web Services, Google Lower Pricing for Cloud Services

In what continues to be a competitive public cloud hosting and infrastructure landscape, Amazon Web Services has reduced pricing for running Windows on its cloud, while Google has lowered the pricing of its Compute Engine services.

The two cloud giants continue to go head to head with one another as well as with private and hybrid cloud rivals.

The move comes a month after Amazon Web Services lowered the price of its new E2 Reserved Instances running Linux/UNIX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server by up to 27 percent.

Google also announced increased the number of virtual servers users can select from, as well as and making its cloud services easier to use for European users.

Though the two public cloud service vendors are continually improving their respective services, pricing will remain the deciding factor that convince companies to move their on premises servers.

Amazon continues to ramp up the selection of Windows-based server products customers can host on its infrastructure, as well as lowering the cost of its Windows on-demand EC2 instances by up to 26 percent.

Amazon also recently lowered the cost of its Simple Storage Service.

Google has also lowered the price of its infrastructure as a service product, Compute Engine, by 4 percent. The IaaS offering, which enables users to run Linux Virtual Machines, now offers instances from $0.132 per hour in the U.S., which is slightly more than Amazon’s EC2 standard on-demand medium instance type which is priced from $0.120 per hour.

In addition to the price reduction, Google is also opening its Compute Engine platform to all companies who sign up for its Gold Support package, a value of $400 per month.

Finally, Google has added new instance types, improved the management console and the ability to run virtual servers in Europe.

http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/amazon-web-services-google-lower-pricing-for-cloud-services