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

kerkour.com

61–70 of 164 posts

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

#61

Can anyone take a crack at why the hell you need a company and its computer farm 3000 miles away to merey sync your calendar, CalDav or whatever it is between two devices that are oerfectly capable of taking to each other or with a local-first mediating process or tool? I don't get what is about syncing things (particularly the basics like Contacts, Calendar/Reminders that requires you to send the data thousands of m…

[deleted]

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

#62

Beware of cloud providers that don't "charge for egress" but do charge on a metric that is effectively a proxy for egress. For example, a cloud streaming service that charges for video delivery by per minute streamed is just charging for egress with extra steps.

Eh? If you're delivering video at scale there's no way anybody is going to do that for free?

Whereas with AWS they charge you for traffic between AWS regions last time I checked?

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

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have regions outside of Germany too. And IIRC, the people being wire tapped were doing some illegal stuff.

Exactly, they were communicating in the russian language.

I mean, I have no idea what they were doing but they literally said (in a deleted HN comment) that what they were doing was illegal.

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

#64
post #5

Serious Q for big Cloud spenders - how much have you negiotiated egress down from the list price?

If you can sign a yearly bandwidth commit (not sure what the minimum bandwidth requirement is, but 1PB / year may be in the ballpark) - you will get prices that are extremely competitive (maybe like 90%+ off base list pricing?)

You can get it down to ~1c/g at best then if you want cheaper you gotta build your own

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

#65
I’ve just never seen bandwidth be a significant part of the bill for any sass I’ve built/worked for. I’m super curious about this. What kind of sass businesses use huge amounts of bandwdith but don’t provide enough commercial value to the customers to make it viable? Can folks with first-hand experience please share here?

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

#66
post #20

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,…

> 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.

Yep, we used to pay about $35/mo for an unmetered 1Gbit 1U slot at our local datacenter. What surprised me (but maybe is a standard these days?) is that you don't even need to install the server physically yourself. You just buy it, ship it to the datacenter, and wait for the remote access.

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

#67
post #20

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,…

In the early 2000s before Google even IPO'ed, they experimented with such colo with unlimited bandwidth allocations to run their search crawler. It turns out something that's labeled unlimited isn't truly unlimited.

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

#68
post #20

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,…

I think that's great for hosting your own stuff. Just personally not something I'd want to do once I really need high availability (power outages/network outages). But I suspect it might actually be a great way for compute bound startups to start for cheap.

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

#69

Can anyone take a crack at why the hell you need a company and its computer farm 3000 miles away to merey sync your calendar, CalDav or whatever it is between two devices that are oerfectly capable of taking to each other or with a local-first mediating process or tool? I don't get what is about syncing things (particularly the basics like Contacts, Calendar/Reminders that requires you to send the data thousands of m…

Put simply: There's no incentive for most organizations to implement this like this.

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

#70
post #34

One thing to keep in mind - if you accidentally run up a bill because of a mistake, there’s a good chance you can reach out to support and they will credit your account. $5k may be a lot to an individual, but the cloud provider’s costs for that service are significantly less and they shouldn’t mind forgiving the charge. Case in point, when the author deleted his account and switched providers, the old host didn’t cha…

That’s still a lot of hopes and prayers you do not end in financial ruin.

Instead, the cloud providers could offer prepaid credits/billing maximums to let individuals sleep at night. I would love to run my side project off of AWS to gain the experience, but no way I feel comfortable with a potentially unlimited liability because I configured something poorly. My joke project can take the uptime hit if it means I know that I will never spend more than $X to host it.

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