Bangalore: In 2006, Amazon started offering IT infrastructure services known as Amazon web Services (AWS) to businesses in the form of web services  now commonly known as cloud computing. Since then the company has cut AWS prices for the 19th time in six years in an attempt to shrug off competition from other key players like Microsoft Azure and Rackspace.

"AWS works hard to lower our costs so that we can pass those savings back to our customers," the company said in a blog post late Monday. "We look to reduce hardware costs, improve operational efficiencies, lower power consumption and innovate in many other areas of our business so we can be more efficient."

The company also mentioned that the initiative of cost cutting has resulted in a "significant price decrease" for Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), ElastiCache, Relational Database Service (RDS), and Elastic Map Reduce reports Chris Kanaracus in pcworld.com

The price reduction will vary depending on geographic region, with price for EC2 Reserved Instances dropping up to 37 percent and On-demand pricing will see a more modest cut of up to 10 percent. While Amazon, like other cloud infrastructure service providers, allows users to purchase computing power by the hour, it also offers Reserved Instances, wherein customers who opt paying for a longer fixed term in return get an advantage of lower pricing. Meanwhile, costs of new reserved Instances of Amazon RDS, which provides a scalable relational database powered by either MySQL or Oracle, will drop up to 42 percent.

The company recently made an announcement targeting large enterprises  "One misperception we sometimes hear is that while EC2 is a phenomenal deal for smaller businesses, the cost benefit may diminish for large customers who achieve scale," the blog states. In fact, "those who take the time to rigorously run the numbers see significant cost advantages in using EC2 regardless of the size of their operations."

"In order to determine what tier you qualify for, you add up all of the upfront Reserved Instance payments for any Reserved Instances that you own," says the company. “If you own more than $250,000 of Reserved Instances, you qualify for a 10% discount on any additional Reserved Instances you buy (that discount applies to both the upfront and the usage prices). If you own more than $2 Million of Reserved Instances, you qualify for a 20% discount on any new Reserved Instances you buy."