Cloud storage pricing: a comparison of current practices

Cloud storage is fast securing its role as a major repository for both consumers and business customers. Many companies now offer storage solutions, sometimes for free for limited volumes. The most apparent means of competition is pricing, though the complexity of pricing plans may make a comparison difficult. We have surveyed the pricing plans of a selection of major cloud providers and compared them using the unit price as the means of comparison. We find that all the providers, excepting Amazon, adopt a bundling pricing scheme; Amazon follows instead a block-declining pricing policy. Our comparison of pricing plans is conducted through a double approach: a pointwise comparison for each value of storage volume, and an overall comparison using a two-part tariff approximation and a Pareto-dominance criterion. Under both approaches, most providers appear to offer pricing plans that are more expensive and can be excluded from a procurement selection in favour of a limited number of dominant providers.

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