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Amazon is looking to continue its rapid growth for S3. While hard drive costs are staying steady or going up due to limited supply, Amazon is actually dropping pricing for S3 storage.

The pricing changes were announced on the AWS blog yesterday. The first tier of storage starts at $0.125 a month per GB for the first 1TB of storage, then pricing drops to $0.11 per GB/month up to 50TB, and so on. Note that there's no change in pricing past the 4,000TB+ tier, so really heavy users of S3 (like Dropbox) aren't really going to see a lot of pricing relief from the change.

Amazon Web Services just reported jaw-dropping growth in the number of objects stored in Amazon S3 year over year.

"As of the end of 2011, there are 762 billion (762,000,000,000) objects in Amazon S3. We process over 500,000 requests per second for these objects at peak times," AWS Evangelist Jeff Bar wrote on the company's blog tonight. The company reported 262 billion objects in storage in Q4 of 2010. "This represents year-over-year growth of 192%; S3 grew faster last year than it did in any year since it launched in 2006." Independent analysts say this is indicative of the growth of the cloud in general and of Amazon's striking dominance of the market.

Management of temporary files, logs and other items will be a bit easier on Amazon S3. The company has just added object expiration, which allows developers set up rules for the automated deletion of files stored in S3.

Amazon recently added multi-object deletion, which speeds up the deletion of objects from an S3 bucket. However, multi-object deletion is capped at 1,000 objects (per request) and doesn't get rid of files automatically.

Dropbox has been testing its Dropbox for Teams service for some time, but the other shoe has finally dropped. The company formally announced the service today, which looks a lot like standard Dropbox with corporate billing tacked on. Good news for companies wanting to offer Dropbox to employees, but is it up to competing with Box.net? Drobox may be the world's 5th most valuable startup, but it's still lagging Box.net pretty badly.

Last March, a new company called Gemini Mobile Technologies initiated an innovative, cloud-hosted database platform service, where objects are stored in Gemini's cloud and customers pay only for the space consumed. That service is now called Cloudian; and earlier this week, Gemini took the second step toward achieving competitive par with big names like Oracle Database Cloud Service.

Thanks to a new partnership between Gemini and the community supporting OpenStack, the open source cloud operating system, developers building applications for OpenStack can utilize the existing API for Amazon S3, the cloud storage access platform, to connect those applications with Cloudian multi-tenant NoSQL databases.

If you ever wondered whether Amazon S3 would be successful, I think we have the answer. Yesterday, Amazon provided an update on S3 growth, stating that S3 now stores 566 billion objects. To make S3 even more appealing, the company announced today that they're adding server-side encryption to S3.

Amazon isn't just hanging on to a lot of data, they're also serving it at a breakneck pace. According to the post by Jeff Barr, Amazon handles up to 370,000 S3 requests per second.

Just in time for the holiday weekend (in the U.S., at least) Amazon has made a few select improvements to its S3 management console. While not Earth-shattering, the features will make using S3 from tablets and behind corporate firewalls a bit easier. Uploading files in bulk just got easier too.

Once upon a time, before the word Internet (or cloud) put dollar signs in VC eyes, sites were built with static tools. All a good Webmaster needed was a text editor and a Web server – maybe a few images and blink tags if they were feeling fancy.

These days, most of the Web is powered by dynamic content management systems like WordPress or Drupal. But what if there was another way, a better way, leveraging cloud services like Amazon S3 or GitHub? Werner Vogels has done just that by using S3 and Jekyll.

We have written before about a little-known facet of AWS, the ability to ship your physical hard drive off to that Big Cloud in Seattle and have them make a copy of all your precious data and put it in their cloud.

Object Versioning now joins the ever growing list of features supported by S3. This proves once again that Amazon Web Services are listening to their customers and putting plenty of distance between them and their competition.