Amazon Web Services has altered the pricing structure of its Simple Storage Service (S3) to offer cheaper online storage based on the amount of data a customer stores.

A sliding scale will be introduced from 1 November giving increasing discounts to those with large data requirements rather than the flat fee currently paid by all customers for each gigabyte stored.

The new pricing means that US customers will pay the standard $0.15 (£0.09) per gigabyte per month for the first 50TB of storage used.

The next 50TB will be charged at $0.14 (£0.08) per gigabyte per month, the next 400TB will cost $0.13 (£0.08) and customers will pay $0.12 (£0.07) per gigabyte per month for any data over 500TB.

European customers will have to fork out slightly more at $0.18 (£0.10), $0.17 (£0.10), $0.16 (£0.09) and $0.15 (£0.09) respectively. The existing data transfer and request charges will remain the same.

The move follows several announcements regarding Amazon's push into cloud computing, including adding support for Windows and SQL Server code, a partnership with Oracle and better localisation of its storage service.

"The growth of Amazon Web Services has allowed us to become even more efficient and further lower our operating expenses," said Alyssa Henry, general manager for Amazon S3.

"Amazon Web Services remains committed to passing savings along to our customers. Just six months ago, we announced a reduction in data transfer costs, and today we're pleased to pass new storage savings along to our customers."

Amazon S3 currently hosts over 29 billion objects, with transactions peaking at around 70,000 requests per second to store, retrieve or delete an object.