AWS is now offering free basic support across the board, and has lowered its premium support prices tooCloud giant Amazon Web Services announced on Thursday that it will now offer free basic support to all of its AWS customers and will cut the price of its premium support as well.
According to the announcement, the new features will help customers improve their use of AWS, and include things like chat functionality and proactive alerts when opportunities exist to save money, improve system performance or close up security gaps.
This move comes a week after Amazon integrated configuration templates and auto-scaling features with its Spot Instances offering in order to simplify the process for users to lower costs of running batch jobs in its cloud.
In its blog post announcing the changes, AWS says it has ditched the bronze, silver, gold and platinum support level names in favor of more descriptive names like basic, developer, business and enterprise. The basic plan is free, developer costs $49 per month with one-on-one support, business features access to AWS Trusted Advisor and while the previous equivalent level, gold, cost $400 per month, the business plan is $100 per month. The enterprise plan offers usage-based pricing rather than a flat fee. AWS says the tier has been reduced from a flat 10 percent usage fee to usage-based pricing tiers of 10 percent, 7 percent, 5 percent and 3 percent.
AWS has not always been known for having the best support, and some companies have opted for smaller cloud providers to get more high-touch support, especially those with mission critical applications. Once considered a kind of differentiator, the support offered by Amazon may be another factor in it winning cloud customers, especially cheap ones. A lot of web hosts offer 24×7 support, have implemented chat functions on websites, and offer enterprise customers a specific support account manager to keep them happy. Last week, CloudFlare added business and enterprise support levels that include more features like DDoS mitigation, and include aggressive SLAs too.
Aside from the lower prices, the new features to the AWS Trusted Advisor inspects the AWS environment using checks like Elastic Load Balancer optimization, recent EBS snapshot warning, EC2 Availability Zone balance, and service limit checks to ensure customers aren’t approaching any administrative limits on the number of EC2 instances, EBS volumes, or Elastic IP addresses.
“Amazon has been passionate about customer service since we started the company 17 years ago,” Brent Jaye, general manager of AWS Support said in a statement. “Putting customers first is part of our DNA. We not only employ talented support engineers all over the world, but also build technology that enables them to provide proactive and helpful information to our customers. Our new Trusted Advisor program is a good example of that — we use technology to determine if customers have security adjustments they should make, or if they’re not architected as fault tolerant as they might want to be, or if they have under-utilized instances that they can terminate and save money. We then use both technology and support professionals to surface this information to customers.”
Customers use AWS Support for not only technical support for new product launches, but also to identify areas where they can use AWS more efficiently. AWS says customers can change or cancel their support plans at any time.
Talk back: What do you think of AWS’ support updates? How does your customer support stack up? Let us know your thoughts in a comment.
Nicole Henderson writes full-time for the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto, and has been writing for the WHIR since September 2010. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.
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