Amazon Launches Paid Web Services Support and Health Monitor

Amazon has announced the launch of premium support services for Amazon Web Services. These support services come two months after the lengthy downtime for the S3 storage service. The new offering will support the following web services: Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS).

There are two plans - here are the details provided by Amazon:

• AWS Premium Support (Silver)
  Provides business day technical support, with response times ranging from four business hours for high severity issues to two business days for lower severity issues. Pricing for the Silver plan is the greater of $100 per month or $0.10 per dollar of total monthly usage of the applicable AWS services, with access to an unlimited number of support cases.
• AWS Premium Support (Gold)
  In addition to the benefits of the Silver plan, the Gold plan provides around-the-clock phone support, and response times of one hour for urgent issues. Pricing for Gold support is the greater of $400 per month or $0.10-$0.20 per dollar of total monthly usage of the applicable AWS services, based on amount of AWS service usage.

The Web Services forums will remain and look like the only way to get free support going forward. One of the biggest complaints when the service went down was the lack of a live status monitor. Amazon has launched today the Service Health Dashboard, which provides live information on the status of each of the Amazon Web Services.