It’s not too often that you hear a service you are using is actually going to cost less than when you first signed up.

For companies using Amazon Web Services (News - Alert), customers got the news this week that as of Feb. 1, Amazon reduced fees by 12 to 13.5 percent, depending on the amount of storage they are using.

“We are excited to announce that we’ve reduced the Amazon S3 standard storage prices in all regions, effective February 1st. With this price change, all Amazon S3 standard storage customers will see a reduction in their storage costs,” according to a statement issued by Amazon Web Services on Feb. 6.

According to AWS, the price reduction applies to all standard storage – both existing storage and new added storage.

For example, if a company stores 50 TB of data on average, they will see a 12 percent reduction in costs, and if a business stores 500 TB of data on average, they will see a 13.5 percent reduction in costs.

The updated prices are available on the Amazon S3 Detail Page.

“We are happy to pass along these savings to you as we continue to innovate and drive down our costs,” Amazon said.

At the end 2011, Amazon S3 housed 762 billion (762,000,000,000) objects and was processing over 500,000 requests per second for these objects during busy times.

“This represents year-over-year growth of 192 percent; S3 grew faster last year than it did in any year since it launched in 2006,” according to AWS Evangelist Jeff Barr, who shared the company’s annual growth chart in a recent blog post.

Referring to the recent drop in AWS prices, Barr said: “It might be useful for you to remember that an added advantage of using a cloud storage service such as Amazon S3 over using your own on-premise storage is that with cloud storage, the price reductions that we regularly roll out apply not only to any new storage that you might add but also to the existing storage that you have. This could amount to considerable financial savings for many of you.”

In related news, last month Amazon signed a deal with FiberLight (News - Alert) to become an Amazon Web Services Direct Connect Solution Provider, TMCnet reported. Thanks to the partnership, FiberLight will be able to hook up their clients with a direct connection to the AWS data centers using secure access to the cloud. 

AWS Direct Connect gives its partners the ability to control their IT infrastructure costs while getting a whole host of useful IT services.