AWS drops bandwidth pricing • Hacker News Board

Re: AWS drops bandwidth pricing

#41

Post by aw3c2 » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 6:33 AM UTC

sjwright wrote: post #29

abronte wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a pretty big e-commerce scraping project, and we don't really run into many problems regarding blacklisted ip's. There are a few sites who we get consistent bans from, but with elastic ip's it's pretty much a non-issue. I have yet to see a site that ban's all amazon ip's.

I run http://whirlpool.net.au and I religiously check the Amazon EC2 forum announcements[1] for new IP ranges to ban. [1] https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=1030

Would you mind telling why?

Re: AWS drops bandwidth pricing

#42

Post by aw3c2 » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 6:34 AM UTC

werner wrote: post #2

My blogpost w background information: http://wv.ly/iLDaqu

Direct link: http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2011/06/aws_bandwith_pri...

Re: AWS drops bandwidth pricing

#43

Post by speckledjim » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 6:53 AM UTC

zaidf wrote: post #38

zmmmmm wrote: post #34

I'm blown away. This radically changes the cost for one of my core products (automated browsing from EC2 machines). I've thought for a long time that EC2 was getting comparatively very expensive for bandwidth (simply not decreasing their prices). I thought they would have to change it, but I didn't expect free!

I wouldn't be surprised if they put a fair use clause somewhere. Otherwise you could hypothetically run a fairly resource intensive bot that scrapes data 24x7 using up aws download bw for no cost.

Instances are already IO bound/capped.

For example, if you start up a micro instance, you'll only be able to download at like 200kbps or something.

So I'd assume the connection speed is linked to the size of the instance, and the bandwidth cost is integrated into that cost somewhat.

Re: AWS drops bandwidth pricing

#44

Post by Pahalial » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 6:54 AM UTC

orijing wrote: post #36

Dropbox must be super happy that half their bandwidth costs have disappeared!

This might be very related, actually - Dropbox just sent out an email announcing downtime for a move to a different data center.

Re: AWS drops bandwidth pricing

#45

Post by sriramk » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 7:08 AM UTC

This is probably a move in response to Windows Azure dropping its inbound data transfer rates to zero last week. When I was back in Windows Azure, we would often see AWS try to do a price-match whenever we changed prices drastically.

Re: AWS drops bandwidth pricing

#46

Post by _delirium » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 7:49 AM UTC

rkalla wrote: post #35

Making all in-bound traffic free is a super-aggressive (and much appreciated) move. As blhack pointed out Voxel's per-GB rate[1] before AWS dropped was extremely competitive, but they charge for in and out-bound data. AWS, after the 1st of July will only charge $0.12 for out-bound data and $0.00 for inbound data, effectively making it something like $0.06/GB compared to Voxel (I'm hand-waving this a bit to make a poi…

It also makes it really appealing for a lot of data-analysis use cases, which are increasingly being done on EC2, because it's a nice way to burst up to a temporary cluster. That use case often has large inbound traffic, as you pull down datasets (say, some genomics data), but then comparatively little outbound traffic.

Re: AWS drops bandwidth pricing

#47

Post by maaku » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 7:49 AM UTC

sjwright wrote: post #29

abronte wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have a pretty big e-commerce scraping project, and we don't really run into many problems regarding blacklisted ip's. There are a few sites who we get consistent bans from, but with elastic ip's it's pretty much a non-issue. I have yet to see a site that ban's all amazon ip's.

I run http://whirlpool.net.au and I religiously check the Amazon EC2 forum announcements[1] for new IP ranges to ban. [1] https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=1030

Why?

Name me one good reason. Name me one.

Re: AWS drops bandwidth pricing

#48

Post by sjwright » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 7:57 AM UTC

maaku wrote: post #47

sjwright wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run http://whirlpool.net.au and I religiously check the Amazon EC2 forum announcements[1] for new IP ranges to ban. [1] https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=1030

Why? Name me one good reason. Name me one.

Shitloads of rogue bots doing "social media monitoring".

Shitloads of rogue bots stealing content for black-hat SEO.

Shitloads of rogue bots harvesting email addresses.

Shitloads of rogue bots submitting spammy replies.

Re: AWS drops bandwidth pricing

#49

Post by nolite » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 8:07 AM UTC

speckledjim wrote: post #43

zaidf wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be surprised if they put a fair use clause somewhere. Otherwise you could hypothetically run a fairly resource intensive bot that scrapes data 24x7 using up aws download bw for no cost.

Instances are already IO bound/capped. For example, if you start up a micro instance, you'll only be able to download at like 200kbps or something. So I'd assume the connection speed is linked to the size of the instance, and the bandwidth cost is integrated into that cost somewhat.

any more info on this? I had no idea this was the case

Re: AWS drops bandwidth pricing

#50

Post by steelaz » Thu, Jun 30, 2011, 8:10 AM UTC

blhack wrote: post #30

For another comparison, voxel.net (which serves imgur): http://www.voxel.net/pricing $0.10/GB up to 40TB $0.07/GB up to 500TB $0.05/GB >500TB This looks like the cheapest "real" CDN I've seen. Awesome :) Not that I need it [yet], but here's to hoping :)

These prices apply to inbound and outbound traffic, Amazon made their inbound traffic free.