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Alibaba Cloud reduces RAM, disk size and price of some cloud servers

Tiniest instance type gets price hike and spec shrinkage

Alibaba Cloud has quietly tweaked prices and specs for some of its cloud servers.

A brief notice posted on August 5th advised the change would be effective immediately and has been made “In order to get closer to the actual business scenarios of customers and improve the quality of products and services”.

The change applies outside mainland China and only to Alibaba Cloud’s Simple Application Servers, a product that the company recommends as a swift and easy way to create and host web-facing applications. The product bundles a server and generous data transfers.

Only one instance type – the lowest-end single-CPU affair – has had a price hike, and then only by three percent. Higher-end Linux instances are down nine points.

But some of the price cuts are accompanied by reductions in server specs. RAM has been halved for some virtual boxes and disk sizes reduced by up to 80GB.

Assuaging matters somewhat is a new instance type. Simple Application Servers previously offered six instance types. Alibaba’s now added a seventh that sits smack in the middle of the range and offers a pair of virtual CPUs, 60GB of disk, 2GB of RAM, 10 Mbit/s networking and 2TB of monthly data transfer./

Excess data charges have also fallen and Alibaba now offers pricing specific to more regions.

While the changes are in line with the usual falls for cloud server prices, the spec reductions are not.

Current users won’t see any change to their services, but new instances created as of today will all have the new specs and prices. ®

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