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AWS drops bandwidth pricing

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81–90 of 96 posts

Re: AWS drops bandwidth pricing

#81
post #54
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…

for 99% of websites...$0.12/gb OUT and 0.0/gb IN will not effectively make this $0.06/gb.

Latch, very fair point. I did a bit too much hand waving there, but maybe more like $0.10/GB would be more accurate.

Re: AWS drops bandwidth pricing

#83
post #75
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use CDNetworks, and at a 50TB commit I'm getting /much/ better pricing than that... I've even been quoted better pricing than that by Akamai (which people in this industry view as notoriously expensive). I might encourage you to drop the quotes around "real" and look at actually real CDNs (the kind you have to call and negotiate pricing with): they aren't as expensive as you apparently think they are.

Are you seriously suggesting that imgur, which is currently doing almost 1PB/month, isn't using a "real" CDN? Quotes are there because I've heard of people buying up "unlimited bandwidth" shared hosting packages, and using them as a cheap "CDN".

No, just that MrGrim is getting ripped off because he doesn't know the industry.

Re: AWS drops bandwidth pricing

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 90% of Tarsnap's bandwidth is inbound... but most of Tarsnap's AWS costs are for storage, not bandwidth. Backup services tend to store a lot of cold data.

As a Tarsnap customer, would this allow you to stop charging on sending data to Tarsnap, or does that still cost you somewhere in the lineup?

Tarsnap's upload costs cover the actual bandwith costs, the per-operation cost of S3 PUTs, the SimpleDB operations for checking account balances, some data storage (when you delete data, you stop paying for it; but I pay until the garbage collection job reaps those blocks)... there are lots of costs. The bandwidth was a significant part of it, though.

I need to crunch some numbers and see how the economics work out before I can commit to anything, but I'm certainly looking at adjusting the pricing.

Re: AWS drops bandwidth pricing

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Tarsnap customer, would this allow you to stop charging on sending data to Tarsnap, or does that still cost you somewhere in the lineup?

Tarsnap's upload costs cover the actual bandwith costs, the per-operation cost of S3 PUTs, the SimpleDB operations for checking account balances, some data storage (when you delete data, you stop paying for it; but I pay until the garbage collection job reaps those blocks)... there are lots of costs. The bandwidth was a significant part of it, though. I need to crunch some numbers and see how the economics work out b…

I assumed there was more to it than just bandwidth costs, just wanted to get an official answer. Thanks.

Re: AWS drops bandwidth pricing

#87
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you seriously suggesting that imgur, which is currently doing almost 1PB/month, isn't using a "real" CDN? Quotes are there because I've heard of people buying up "unlimited bandwidth" shared hosting packages, and using them as a cheap "CDN".

No, just that MrGrim is getting ripped off because he doesn't know the industry.

grim isn't paying that much for voxel. Voxel cut him a ridiculous deal in exchange for the advertising they get out of it.

We're talking about them right now. The only reason I mentioned them is because I heard about them in relation to imgur.

Re: AWS drops bandwidth pricing

#88

Amazon is now the #1 choice for web scrapers everywhere :)

I thought most AWS IP addresses were blocked by most admins. Does any one have experience scraping using Amazon.

In my experience no UK newspapers block AWS IP addresses.

Re: AWS drops bandwidth pricing

#89
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for 99% of websites...$0.12/gb OUT and 0.0/gb IN will not effectively make this $0.06/gb.

Can you elaborate on this? Not disputing your point, but it would be nice if someone could jump in with some real world numbers or a rule of thumb.

Goto facebook, or SO, or HN or youtube or almost any site...open firebug or whatever, and calculate the amount of inbound traffic to the outbound traffic (keep in mind that this is reverse for you and the host). You should notice that your outbound traffic (their inbound), which is mostly short GET headers, is like 1% of your inbound (their outbound).

Sites where you upload a lot of content, like YouTube, still have much, much more reads (outbound) than writes (inbound). Probably by an order of magnitude.

Systems like Dropbox would benefit - though they were already getting different pricing I'm sure. But this is really a tiny fraction of how most online systems work.

Re: AWS drops bandwidth pricing

#90
post #63
post #45

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.

I know Amazon pays very little attention to competitors. However, their customers might have asked them to lower prices in response to Azure.

Can't comment as to what AWS does, but Amazon itself pays a ton of attention to competitors, employing things like screen-scraping bots to keep track of competitors' pricing.
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