Live data from Hacker News

AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

theinformation.com

231–240 of 252 posts

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#231
post #6

Is there a plausible explanation why egress fees from cloud providers costs around $0.1/GB? "Traditional" server providers such as Hetzner are able to offer bandwidth at orders of magnitude lower price (eg. $1.1/TB). I understand that cloud providers may have better interconnects or better uptimes, but that doesn't justify the magnitudes higher pricing.

I doubt that you'll find you can consistently push or pull 1Gbps from a Hetzner server. I certainly can't. --That's not to say that they're a bad deal, but their total bandwidth is nowhere near what the major cloud providers can give you.

Cannot confirm this claim.

I've always got full 1Gbps out of Hetzner, even across the ocean, and for periods of multiple days of transfers.

(Like on all machines, you need to set the right TCP settings for windows sizes to make it physically possible.)

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#232
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have had this debate with so many people, AWS is not cheaper than your own hosting. Period. What you get from AWS is the logistics pipeline is already built as is the infrastructure should you suddenly require to serve factors of traffic more. The ROI of AWS comes from the backend and capex vs opex debates. Example : The CFO can go to the board and explain we are getting ready to reduce opex by laying off 10 develo…

I think the best cases for AWS is counter to marketing, very small companies. Their native offerings do make things great for a while when you're starting out. The other is stupendous burst activity, like you just need a thousand(s) cores for a couple hours. Of course this doesen't mean the baseload has to be in AWS, just easy for small teams.

Agreed.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#233
post #166
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get your point, but then why does AWS charge for inter-az traffic? That seems like an "egress but not really" kinda thing. If AWS/GCP stopped charging for this, customers would be incentivized to build HA systems and distribute their workloads across AZ's, which are a win for both customers and you (since capacity is now spread instead of stuck in a zone).

Something has to pay for the fat pipe between colos ( AZ's)

But those are probably far below $1/TB. Otherwise other colocation providers couldn't offer that even with peering.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#234
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If there's a compelling case for doing it differently, someone should do it and see if it works. Cloudflare doesn't charge for bandwidth. I always throw cloudflare on top of anything I do, not because I really need a CDN or anything, but because the bandwidth cost would bankrupt me otherwise. The ceo of cloudflare gave the rationale on why they don't charge: > There’s a fixed cost of setting up those peering arrang…

According to Cloudflare, they do not have any bandwidth pricing arrangement with Microsoft for Azure users. They also do charge for Enterprise plans, but instead of transparent pricing I got high-pressure sales techniques and black box pricing offers - which then anchored our rate so that as we grow past our current contract, we're forced to upgrade at any point with pricing based solely on our original negotiation.…

Just FYI in case it helps you - https://docs.fastly.com/en/guides/outbound-data-transfer-fro...

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#235
post #6

Is there a plausible explanation why egress fees from cloud providers costs around $0.1/GB? "Traditional" server providers such as Hetzner are able to offer bandwidth at orders of magnitude lower price (eg. $1.1/TB). I understand that cloud providers may have better interconnects or better uptimes, but that doesn't justify the magnitudes higher pricing.

I doubt that you'll find you can consistently push or pull 1Gbps from a Hetzner server. I certainly can't. --That's not to say that they're a bad deal, but their total bandwidth is nowhere near what the major cloud providers can give you.

Why can't you? I'm doing this regularly (backups & restore). I get reliably 1gbit/s from other providers, also from US (with multiple connections of course). Haven't come across a provider where speed would be significantly below that.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#236
post #85
post #6

Is there a plausible explanation why egress fees from cloud providers costs around $0.1/GB? "Traditional" server providers such as Hetzner are able to offer bandwidth at orders of magnitude lower price (eg. $1.1/TB). I understand that cloud providers may have better interconnects or better uptimes, but that doesn't justify the magnitudes higher pricing.

> Is there a plausible explanation why egress fees from cloud providers costs around $0.1/GB? Isn't DigitalOcean a cloud provider ($0.01/GB)?. Isn't Oracle a cloud provider (first 10 TB free, $ 0.0085 after)? Isn't OVH a cloud provider (free bandwidth)?

Which means higher pricing at GCP/AWS/Azure can't be explained by higher availability, DO offers the same.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#237
post #139
post #6

Is there a plausible explanation why egress fees from cloud providers costs around $0.1/GB? "Traditional" server providers such as Hetzner are able to offer bandwidth at orders of magnitude lower price (eg. $1.1/TB). I understand that cloud providers may have better interconnects or better uptimes, but that doesn't justify the magnitudes higher pricing.

When your link is bargain basement C* "good luck" peering, it can be super cheap and honestly will likely get everything most users need. When you care about packet level SLOs... yeah, you start to shop around.

But how many applications on AWS really need that? It's probably a fraction of bandwidth that'd need such a SLO.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#238
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When was the last time AWS reduced egress rates? And they could negotiate the best rates on the planet given their scale.

I get the impression cloud providers don't "negotiate rates" but rather "build infrastructure" most of the time.

They don't own many of their data centers. Locations were leaked a while ago, most are colocated in major data centers. They won't dig new trenches and lay cables between those but rather negotiate rates for existing fiber.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#239
post #44
post #32

Wow, does it really cost 4-5x more to download a 1 GB file from S3 or Google Cloud Storage than it does to store it for a month? That is mind-blowing.

Bandwidth is expensive, storage is cheap.

Not with smaller cloud providers or colocation centers.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#240
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course, to make them fully independent, you have to replicate everything, so you wind up buying several redundant copies of your system... Yeah, and keeping around warm systems ready to failover in case of a zonal outage seems like a preposterous waste of resources. The alternative... to keep around multiple replicas of your system in different zones, all ready to accept traffic and which do serve traffic, seems…

It's not a waste when it serves a purpose. Availability is a big concern

Sure, from the perspective of availability, it makes sense to keep this around. The US military has redundancies in place to handle many kinds of adverse scenarios, which comes at a price, but is justifiable. The point I'm trying to make is that if availability is the _only_ value, it becomes hard to justify that if you're a scrappy for-profit corp looking at your bottom line.

If instead of availability being the only value, there would be a more value provided from actually using such resources, more folks would adopt cross-AZ architectures which would be a win-win for both the customer (get HA for lower or no cost and go down less often and succeed in the market) and thus the cloud provider (keep raking in the steady cloud revenue as the customer grows).

Post reply on HN