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

kerkour.com

81–90 of 164 posts

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

#81

Cloudflare R2 (their S3 clone) has free egress. We are in the middle of migrating about 5TB of fairly active data from Google Cloud Storage to R2. For years now, most of our cloud bill has been egress from GCS. Activity spiked recently and doing something about it became urgent. R2 has an S3-compatible API (we're using the Amazon-provided S3 Java SDK). Storage is 25% cheaper than GCS standard. Making our code multi-p…

It's a bit worrying though that one day they might decide to not leave the money on the table.

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

#82

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?

They're not asking for free service, they're just noting that a claim of "free egress" might be a lie.

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

#83

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?

Any CDN that doesnt charge for egress (like cloudflare) will deliver your videos without charges.

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

#84
I'm surprised this about egress without mentioning the new Sippy: https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/data-migration/sippy/

It allows you to incrementally migrate off of providers like S3 and onto the egress-free Cloudflare R2. Very clever idea.

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

#85
post #25

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

$1500/mo commit got our bandwidth down to < $.001/GB in AWS via CloudFront.

So the $23K DDOS bill at AWS from the article would be only $476. Not bad.

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

#86
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Did you see the sibling comment posted 45 minutes before you saying they pay 0.1c/g at aws when committing to spending 1500$/month?

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

#88
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Did you see the sibling comment posted 45 minutes before you saying they pay 0.1c/g at aws when committing to spending 1500$/month?

Did you see my comment in a sibling thread? If this was common then you could earn $$$ via egress arbitrage…

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

#89
post #16

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 l…

Yeah I think the list is only highlighting the worst offenders. It would be more useful to also include the cheap VPS providers mentioned later, that would be: - Scaleway: $0 - Hetzner: ~$490 _(article says bandwidth is free but I think above 20TB it's charged at 1 Euro/TB)_ - DigitalOcean/Vultr: ~$5k depending on compute usage _(you get a free bandwidth allowance based on compute)_

How far does the FUP go on that 0$ offer, though?

It doesn't say on the pricing page, VPS info page, or the various pdf documents with terms and conditions. Maybe you need to sign up and get to the ordering page before you can see the conditions applying to your VPS or maybe I overlooked it, but this is where I stopped looking

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

#90
There are a couple things this article glosses over. With Vercel vs. Netlify, be mindful of the many other fees they charge besides bandwidth. I wouldn’t be surprised if the costs are comparable when that’s accounted for. Sometimes the answer with these things is just to be diligent. Don’t be surprised at what you get if you stick your hand in a meat grinder. Put up guards in your CI process if you have to.

The other thing is that I’m not sure how willing I am to jump to endorse an efficient cache policy as a blanket prescription like they seem to. I suppose I’m not opposed to the advice, but it has very strong “draw the owl” vibes. Project requirements vary, and I’d even argue that sometimes minimal or no caching is wise when requirements are subject to change or you’re doing a lot of static deployments because the savings can sometimes not be worth the headache. End-users are very demanding nowadays. Sometimes “it’ll roll over soon” isn’t good enough. Caching is tricky. Make sure you really get it right in addition to doing the math on the cost-savings if you go down that road.

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