Rackspace Hosting on Friday announced that it is lowering the price for cloud bandwidth and content delivery network (CDN) services by 33 percent. The company also announced that it is implementing tiered pricing for its open cloud product portfolio, starting with Cloud Files, its object storage service. The new pricing changes will take place over the next several weeks, beginning on February 22nd with tiered pricing for Cloud Files.

Rackspace’s customers deploying bandwidth-intensive workloads serving large amounts of content (which include video streaming, mobile and applications that require fast content delivery to end users) will benefit from the lower price of bandwidth, including CDN bandwidth. The price will change from $0.18 to $0.12 per GB.

In addition to the price reduction for bandwidth and CDN bandwidth, Rackspace is introducing a tiered pricing structure. The first product to feature tiered pricing is Cloud Files object storage. The volume discounts range from $0.10 per GB per month for the first 1TB, decreasing to $0.075 per GB per month and even lower for storage amounts over 1024 TB. Rackspace will roll out tiered pricing for additional products throughout 2013. For more details on the bandwidth price reduction and the tiered pricing structure, please visit: http://www.rackspace.com/blog/lower-open-cloud-pricing/.

“The Rackspace Open Cloud is built upon a simple pricing model with no hidden costs or extra charges,” said John Engates, Chief Technology Officer at Rackspace. “This simple and straightforward pricing approach is a key part of how we help customers take advantage of the real value of the Rackspace Open Cloud, particularly for the next generation of bandwidth and content-centric web applications, which must deliver quality user experiences on a mobile and global basis.”

Rackspace aims to make budgeting easier for mid-market and enterprise customers through simple pricing, avoiding charging customers for “extras” that are difficult to predict or estimate. For example, Rackspace does not charge for I/O requests on its Cloud Block Storage product or for API requests on its Cloud Files object storage product.

“Our focus continues to be on delivering cloud services that are differentiated in the market through our combined emphasis on being Open and Fanatical,” added Engates. “Simple pricing is a feature of the Open Cloud. Our cloud services are easy to use, highly performant and reliable, while giving customers the choice they need to avoid lock-in.”

For additional information on the Rackspace Open Cloud, visit: www.rackspace.com/cloud.