Perhaps it was only a matter of time after significant PR damage from outages earlier this year, but Amazon's Web Services have finally been accompanied with some real support options from the company. Taking a move from the Salesforce playbook, Amazon has introduced a publicly available website which provides real-time and historical information about S3, EC2, and other Amazon web services. In a related move, the company will now offer pre-paid support options to customers, starting at $100/month for one on one support with a one-hour guaranteed response time.

Although the pricing sounds hefty considering the relatively low cost of the services themselves, they are designed for companies using the Amazon back end as significant parts of their corporate IT infrastructure. Businesses operating such systems will find it well worth the price to protect thousands of dollars in transactions that may be flowing over the system. This sort of a la carte approach is excellent for cloud computing services, demonstrating at once the flexibility of the model and subsidizing better service overall for every user while providing significant users with the responsiveness they are willing to pay for.