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Why cloud bandwidth is so obscenely expensive and what you can do about that

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Re: Why cloud bandwidth is so obscenely expensive and what you can do about that

#11

Post by weird-eye-issue »

zeroCalories wrote: post #9
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #6

TL;DR - author claims the hardest part of running a cloud PaaS is networking, thus the cloud providers charge you a ton for egress to outsource the optimization problem to you. It's not clear to me this claim is true - they're in the business of solving exactly this optimization problem - and they have, they're just capturing maximum profit. If it was really the hardest / most costly - then other providers wouldn't b…

??? This is obviously true. The bandwidth available in a geographic location is, practically speaking, limited. Roads are cheap to pave, but if there was congestion 24/7 and you paved all you could, then you would need to start rationing road usage. For a business the best way to ration is to charge more. Solving this problem requires a massive amount of engineering work, which would also justify the increased cost.

How does Cloudflare offer it for free?

Re: Why cloud bandwidth is so obscenely expensive and what you can do about that

#12

Post by CodesInChaos »

I think egress would benefit from some regulation. This would enable other companies to compete with specific AWS services, without competing with AWS as a whole. Though I probably wouldn't price cap egress itself, but rather force amazon to offer cheap peering.

Re: Why cloud bandwidth is so obscenely expensive and what you can do about that

#13

Post by api »

Based on the pricing you see at VPS providers, bare metal providers, and colocation, I have long called BS on large cloud provider bandwidth pricing. It's completely insane, like more than 10X higher than VPSes and more than 100-1000X higher than wholesale (bare metal and colo).

Take this for example: https://www.fdcservers.com/

That company is profitable, which means they have to be paying less than this for bandwidth or at least selling bandwidth at cost and paying less for other things. I'm sure they are overselling but even then this model couldn't work if bandwidth were anywhere even close to what cloud charges for it. (We run a few things there for high bandwidth simple services and it works great and seems to be as advertised. There are many other companies with insanely low pricing on bandwidth, but they're one of the cheapest.)

The key to understanding why I really think AWS/GCP/etc. price bandwidth the way they do is that ingress is free and egress is absurdly expensive. I call this "roach motel pricing" after the old roach motel ad: "roaches go in, but they don't come out." The obvious objective is to get data to flow effortlessly in but make it costly to either relay data for edge or endpoint first computation or move data out. The whole pricing structure is to encourage cloud providers to suck in the entire computing ecosystem and host it internally within large data centers, which is their business model. It works very well.

The instant I saw this pricing structure when cloud first started to be introduced I immediately understood what was happening here.

Re: Why cloud bandwidth is so obscenely expensive and what you can do about that

#14

Post by CodesInChaos »

ushakov wrote: post #10
AaronM wrote: post #3

Summary: Use a provider that doesnt charge egress Optimize your egress usage

Hetzner comes to mind…

Hetzner's peerings aren't the best, especially outside EU/US. Plus they recently intercepted traffic to one of their servers, an attack likely perpetrated by the German state.

Re: Why cloud bandwidth is so obscenely expensive and what you can do about that

#16

Post by tedivm »

I'm kind of amazed that AWS is the cheapest on this list, as they're typically the first example people give when they talk about overcharging for bandwidth.

When I worked at Malwarebytes between 2008 and 2014 we measured our bandwidth in petabytes, but it was still only about $25k/month. This was obviously a custom contract, but it really is interesting how bandwidth pricing has remained relatively static over the last decade.

Re: Why cloud bandwidth is so obscenely expensive and what you can do about that

#17

Post by CathalMullan »

A word of warning when it comes to Vultr. While they are listed as a member of the "Bandwidth Alliance", they don't discount egress automatically. You need to request the discount from support.

See: https://www.answeroverflow.com/m/1118148928915918990

Re: Why cloud bandwidth is so obscenely expensive and what you can do about that

#18

Post by tyingq »

api wrote: post #13

Based on the pricing you see at VPS providers, bare metal providers, and colocation, I have long called BS on large cloud provider bandwidth pricing. It's completely insane, like more than 10X higher than VPSes and more than 100-1000X higher than wholesale (bare metal and colo). Take this for example: https://www.fdcservers.com/ That company is profitable, which means they have to be paying less than this for bandwid…

Searching for terms like "wholesale bandwidth transit" might be a better reference for comparison of actual cost. The providers you mention are depending somewhat on customers that statistically underutilize what they have and using obscure TOS clauses to chase away heavy users.

Re: Why cloud bandwidth is so obscenely expensive and what you can do about that

#19

Post by ddorian43 »

api wrote: post #13

Based on the pricing you see at VPS providers, bare metal providers, and colocation, I have long called BS on large cloud provider bandwidth pricing. It's completely insane, like more than 10X higher than VPSes and more than 100-1000X higher than wholesale (bare metal and colo). Take this for example: https://www.fdcservers.com/ That company is profitable, which means they have to be paying less than this for bandwid…

> Take this for example: https://www.fdcservers.com/

You took "as example" literally the cheapest provider that exists in this space. (and lowest network quality/connections)

Re: Why cloud bandwidth is so obscenely expensive and what you can do about that

#20

Post by Syonyk »

What you can do about it is go back to the early 2000s and rack up your own boxes in a colo, with some reasonable unmetered bandwidth allocations, and skip the whole "cloud" nonsense.

My personal box is a 6C/12T Xeon from a few years back, 128GB ECC RAM, and about 24TB usable disk plus 2TB NVMe, for running a lot of other VMs that I run actual services in (remote backup, my web presence, communications, game servers, the works). Then a 25Mbit/100Mbit burst connection at a local datacenter for a bit over $100/mo.

A 12vCPU/96GB RAM GCE N2 box with similar specs as my box is about $1800/mo. So... given that "a few months of cloud spend" buys my system, I genuinely don't see the case for "cloud" if you're using a lot of data, or a lot of RAM, or a lot of CPU. Yes, it's managed and convenient, but it's horridly expensive for what you get compared to "owning your own hardware."

I'd been spending quite a bit more a month on various cloud instances to do the same thing I do with my server.

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