While most people might think Amazon is a place to buy books, DVDs and other items, many Internet engineers will associate the name with the company’s cloud computing efforts. With the lowering of prices for the company’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) platform, they might have more of a reason for making use of Amazon Web Services (News - Alert).

“We are excited to announce that we are reducing Amazon S3 request prices in all nine of our regions,” Amazon’s announcement page said. “We are lowering the prices for GET requests by 60 percent and the prices for PUT, LIST, COPY, and POST requests by 50 percent.”

These are the basic instructions that allow developers to shuttle information from users’ devices to the servers hosting the websites and social networking services that customers are really interested in.

In the U.S. standard region, 1,000 PUT requests will cost between $0.05 cents and $0.004.

The new prices are effective on April 1. Up to the first terabyte of standard storage, each gigabyte costs $0.095, with the price per gigabyte dropping as customers store even more data. Users can sign up for a free tier, which delivers 5 GB of space.

Reduced Reduncy Storage and Amazon Glacier offer added reliability, but also cost more.

Amazon’s S3 aims to make Web storage available to developers. The firm maintains nine data centers, three of them in the U.S., Ireland, Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney and Sao Paolo – plus an additional data center reserved for the U.S. government.

The data is stored in “buckets” which are given a unique key that the customers have access to.

Amplidata (News - Alert), a company specializing in what it calls “unbreakable” cloud storage, will demonstrate the capabilities of S3 at the annual National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference in Las Vegas, particularly its use in “digital storytelling” by storing large amounts of digital cinema video for post-production.