Amazon S3 for science grids: a viable solution?
DADC '08 Proceedings of the 2008 international workshop on Data-aware distributed computing
Why cloud computing will never be free
Communications of the ACM
RACS: a case for cloud storage diversity
Proceedings of the 1st ACM symposium on Cloud computing
The good, the bad and the ugly of consumer cloud storage
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review
Long-range Evaluation of Risk in the Migration to Cloud Storage
CEC '11 Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE 13th Conference on Commerce and Enterprise Computing
Deconstructing Amazon EC2 Spot Instance Pricing
CLOUDCOM '11 Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE Third International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science
Pricing of insurance policies against cloud storage price rises
ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review
Inside dropbox: understanding personal cloud storage services
Proceedings of the 2012 ACM conference on Internet measurement conference
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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.