Thursday, April 17, 2008

Amazon Launches Premium Support For Web Services Offerings

Seattle-based Amazon Web Services said today that it has launched a new offering, AWS Premium Support, which provides personalized technical assistance to users of their Web Services products. The new support option covers the firm's Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS). According to Amazon, the new support offerings will come in two flavors: Silver, and Gold. The Silver plan will provide a response time of four hours for high severity items, and two days for lower severity issues, and will cost users $100 per month or $0.10 per dollar of total monthly usage, whichever is higher. The Gold Plan provides phone support, and a one hour response time, and will cost $400 a month, or $0.10-$0.20 per hour of AWS services, whichever is greater. Finally, Amazon said it has launched a new Health Dashboard feature which allows all of its customers operational status on the services; the new dashboard will be available to its customer for free. Amazon's web services are provided to other companies on a as-needed basis, who tap into the company's bank of computing and storage services via application programming interfaces (APIs).