21–30 of 233 posts
The costs of doing those (well) yourself are not cheap.
Getting them from a provider that's certified to do them well while giving you software control also isn't cheap.
You're comparing cost of gas per gallon to to expense of miles driven per gallon. Pretty sure on your IRS or corporate expense report those aren't the same.
I have posted a few times about how absurdly expensive all the cloud providers are. If you have a baseline load you should be co-locating bare metal. Any excess capacity you need should spill over into your AWS/GCE/Azure account. For example: A dedicated m4.16xLarge EC2 instance in AWS is $3987/month. You could build that same server for $15,000 through Dell, lease it at $400/month (OpEx), and colo it with a 1GB/s bl…
I have posted a few times about how absurdly expensive all the cloud providers are. If you have a baseline load you should be co-locating bare metal. Any excess capacity you need should spill over into your AWS/GCE/Azure account. For example: A dedicated m4.16xLarge EC2 instance in AWS is $3987/month. You could build that same server for $15,000 through Dell, lease it at $400/month (OpEx), and colo it with a 1GB/s bl…
But if you are comparing it to a purchased server, you ought to be looking at Reserve pricing, a 1 year reserved instance is $16K/year, 3 years is $32K (or you can pay monthly if you want).
Still not as cheap as owning the server, but not quite as bad.
Keep in mind that with cloud providers you're also paying for the SDN that makes dynamic provisioning of VMs and logical network segmentation possible. Scalable SDN is much harder / more expensive than traditional networking.
Yet they charge zero for the SDN and crazy high prices for Internet bandwidth.
I have posted a few times about how absurdly expensive all the cloud providers are. If you have a baseline load you should be co-locating bare metal. Any excess capacity you need should spill over into your AWS/GCE/Azure account. For example: A dedicated m4.16xLarge EC2 instance in AWS is $3987/month. You could build that same server for $15,000 through Dell, lease it at $400/month (OpEx), and colo it with a 1GB/s bl…
I'm not sure which region you priced, but an m4.16xlarge in us-east-1 (Virginia) is $3.20/hour, or $2304/month. But if you are comparing it to a purchased server, you ought to be looking at Reserve pricing, a 1 year reserved instance is $16K/year, 3 years is $32K (or you can pay monthly if you want). Still not as cheap as owning the server, but not quite as bad.
edit: I had selected a dedicated instance in order to compare apples to apples. By definition you don't share a colo server.
How is this is a surprise to anyone? The big players are all pushing their clouds because its a cash bonanza. It's the SaaS model for hardware, make money forever because your customers never own anything. I've done the math many times and it's orders of magnitude cheaper to colocate as long as you can afford an IT guy and the upfront cost of hardware.
What happens when a harddrive fails in your colo? Unless you have best practice backups, you will lose customer data and trust.
GCloud abstracts the issue of hardware so you can focus on real business development. And to some, that's worth the cost until they can properly afford all the hidden costs of independent hosting.
I personally don't see the outrage. AmaGoogSoft overcharges for data transfers because they know they can get away with it and that lowering it won't attract more customers.
Customers with transfer-heavy applications will always buy their servers from providers with unlimited transfers like OVH[0][1], where you can do hundreds of terabytes a month with no extra charges (1.5 Gbps * 3600 * 24 * 30 = 486 TB). Even if AmaGoogSoft lowered their transfer prices by 100 fold their pricing still can't compete with OVH.
Companies with enough engineering resources can always go with the best of both worlds: transfer-heavy servers on OVH, and "regular" servers on AmaGoogSoft. The expensive data transfers will only hit smaller outfits, but these customers won't switch because it's not worth the hassle to split your hosting across two providers.
[0] https://www.ovh.com/us/private-cloud/options/bandwidth.xml