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U.S and Europe Cloud Customers Pay 80x the AWS Costs! WTF!!
Well yesterday Cloudflare published an in-depth article about Amazon's Egregious Egress Pricing and how massively it charges the AWS cloud customers and the real reason behind AWS is a milking-cow for Amazon corporation.
The motive of that post was AWS didn't join CF's Bandwidth Alliance (like Azure, Google Cloud and Backblaze did) by either substantially discount or entirely waive egress fees when sending traffic from their network to a peer.
But the post did revealed the pricing structure and amounts of profit Amazon is minting from charging for bandwidth egress.
The post is quite long one to read. But here is the shortest explanation:
AWS charges customers based on the amount of data delivered — 1 terabyte (TB) per month, for example. To visualize that, imagine data is water. AWS fills a bucket full of water and then charges you based on how much water is in the bucket. This is known as charging based on stocks. On the other hand, AWS pays for bandwidth based on the capacity of their network. The base unit of wholesale bandwidth is priced as one Megabit per second per month (1 Mbps). Typically, a provider like AWS, will pay for bandwidth on a monthly fee based on the number of Mbps that their network uses at its peak capacity. So, extending the analogy, AWS doesn't pay for the amount of water that ends up in their customers' buckets, but rather the capacity based on the diameter of the “hose” that is used to fill them. This is known as paying for flows
And here is the infographic posted by them:
Cloudflare further explains:
Instead, it’s symmetrical. That means that if you purchase a 1 Mbps (1 Megabit per second) connection, then you have the capacity to send 1 Megabit out and receive another 1 Megabit in every second. If you receive 1 Mbps in and simultaneously 1 Mbps out, you pay the same price as if you receive 1 Mbps in and 0 Mbps out or 0 Mbps in and 1 Mbps out. In other words, ingress (data sent to AWS) doesn’t cost them any more or less than egress (data sent from AWS). And yet, they charge customers more to take data out than put it in. It’s a head scratcher.
I was also an ex-customer of AWS for very tiny projects and did shift later to non-cloud vps and storage providers due to the complexity in AWS pricing for novice users like me.
But AWS customers here should definitely read the Cloudflare's blog post and now ask amazon to join bandwidth alliance and discount those fat-egress-fees! (It's another thing Amazon will turn deaf ears to it)
But still U.S and Europe customers are paying whopping 80x the Amazon costs is bit too much if we consider big corporations, banks, airline, and IT companies relying on AWS cloud products and affects the pockets of small projects/individual web developers too!
It's better to move away from AWS and such other "Cloud Providers" who charge of egress and rather pick someone from bandwidth alliance or use traditional vps/server from solid providers here!
Comments
While the concerns raised are true, from my perspective it's still a hit piece.
GCP and Azure have even higher data transfer rates when not using Cloudflare, so the dynamic of 8000% markups (or whatever it is, based on region) costs still apply to them. But since GCP and Azure have joined the bandwidth alliance, and are therefore conveniently left out from the article.
A lot of providers I see here don't have unlimited egress either (it's called bandwidth here).
Literally just wrote this up for LowEndBox for 7/28 this evening after reading the CF post, which was quoted on the SeekingAlpha news feed. It's a pretty good read.
What are you talking about? The article didn't discuss unlimited bandwidth.
i think, this is not just simple how much bandwidth used.
many other big company have many service, imagine that you need deploy hundrer of service backend or frontend, but yes, bandwidth usage in s3 will be pricy, but we can create CDN easyly or Multiple A-Z service.
Cloudflare sells the Magic Transit for around $4000 for 100Mbps clean bandwidh and Anti-DDoS
Does any host here use these Cloud providers? It's usually on dedis anyway right?
Are you gonna ask your provider for a 5Mbps port unlimited transfer, instead of 1TB cap on 1Gbps port?
Either way, your bandwidth has been doubled.
I would certainly prefer the former to the latter.
Non-unlimited bandwidth just means that you have already pre-paid for bandwidth (egress, or sometimes even total data transfer). Sure, it's maybe half of what AWS is charging. But that would mean 40x AWS' costs instead of 80x.
Why? This isn't 2001.
For me, having the peace of mind of not having to pay extra for bandwidth is very important. I don't stream or do anything that uses up too much bandwidth anyway, so I'm okay with even a 5 Mbps (or even 1 Mbps) connection. I don't download too much stuff, I don't run a botnet, nothing of that sort.
What's more important for me is latency, so I try to find overseas providers that are geographically closer to me. The issue is, I'm closest to Singapore, and it seems that bandwidth there is crazy expensive. Even OVH has a special clause that says their Singapore (and Sydney) locations have reduced fair-use bandwidth.
The problem with a 1 TB cap on a 1 Gbps port, is that if somehow my site gets a lot of traffic, then I will be charged for the extra network usage.
An alternative is actually a bandwidth limiter (like, the machine becomes inaccessible after X GB of transfer). However, I don't see that option from many providers here, either. A bandwidth is okay since I can usually access the machine using the HTML5 serial console, and when I everything is alright then I'll just pay more for extra bandwidth for that month. I know that I won't suddenly get an invoice of a few hundred dollars, on a sub-$10 VPS.
Some providers just throttle the throughout to 10Mbps after reaching your bandwidth limit, just sign up with one of those providers.
Also, since you don't use much bandwidth, you're being over cautious, especially since you can easily monitor the monthly bandwidth and take action as soon as something doesn't look right.
You're trading a potential problem with lots of mitigation with a poor experience. Your site won't be successful with a lot of visitors with a 5Mbps connection. Anyway, you do you.
someone had to pay for the dig rocket
People are just realizing this now?
Don’t use AWS.
aws is alright in specific use cases
Well, so is HostSolutions…
I don't see too many providers with this kind of service though. OVH is one of them. Most providers I see here usually have a bandwidth of a few TB per month.
I understand your point of view btw. Maybe my use case is just too uncommon, that most providers don't cater to it.
as 1TB per month is about 3mbps, (986gb), you can limit at server side and have peace of mind?
AMAZON AWS should be call the way to get RIPOFF
How is this a surprise to anyone?
AWS Lightsail has been providing 1TB for $5 for a while now... It's obvious that Amazon can charge much less for bandwidth if they wanted to, but clearly it's enough of a cash cow that they keep the stupid rates since overall compared to GCloud and Azure, they're still the cheapest cloud provider.
I thought Microsoft had some public commitment to always match AWS prices.
In fact, for network, I believe Azure is cheaper:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/bandwidth/
First 5GB is free, next 10TB is .0875 per GB.
https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
First 1GB is free, next 9.999TB is .09 per GB.
Yeah for bandwidth, but I'm pretty sure some number of their other services are more expensive.
This was a while ago so I'm not sure if this still applies.
Yeah... I think AWS prices are so insane that no other public cloud would be higher than them. Oracle cloud is like 80% cheaper (esp when it comes to bandwidth) for example. I've used Azure and GCP in the past for various work, and I don't remember them being as expensive as AWS.
GCP's standard bandwidth tier is priced at $0.085/GB, but most of their services use the premium tier which is priced at $0.12-$0.23/GB based on the destination location of the traffic.
I suppose I can do that, if the provider only charges for excess egress. (most providers do this)
I don't know how to do that (yet), but it should be feasible. Thanks
This has always been a big issue with me when working on enterprise/public sector jobs and is why I always prefer a hybrid approach.
TCO calculations done by the various sales people either at $cloudVendor or at $cloudVendorPartner often ignore or significantly overlook data transfer as part of a TCO comparison between using more traditional infrastructure and "the cloud".
TCO calculations are usually incredibly bullshit anyway (almost always designed to make cloud look really good) and ignore a lot of factors, but even if they were accurate... once you include the data transfer costs, the TCO of a cloud setup is almost always more expensive than in-house and is very often the culprit of why a large technology project will go over budget.
Even a hybrid approach has annoying fees, AWS Direct Connect - where you literally pay for a direct connection to AWS (so the bandwidth costs them fuck all), they still charge $0.02/GB on top of ~$250/month for a 1G port. (At Equinix MA1 and SK1 at least)
AWS/GCP/Azure provide some very good services and I find a lot of them very useful for achieving tasks -- sometimes the speed and scalability they offer is worth a massive markup. However, the cost for some basic things that people outsource to the cloud can be astronomical, especially if going "cloud" means throwing all your VMs in to EC2 and calling it a day.
AWS is overpriced and totally unnecessary if you don't need scaling.