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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

#91

Post by danpalmer »

mlhpdx wrote: post #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?

Bandwidth is rarely an issue if you're transferring mostly text, often an issue if you're transferring images (except for highly cacheable static images), and always an issue if you're transferring video or game assets. That's just how it works because the orders of magnitude differ so much.

An image resource can easily be 100x some text (or HTML or API response), and a video can easily be 1000x an image.

Another factor is cacheability. If you're a B2B SaaS business you'll have few clients and can take advantage of caching much more typically. If you're B2C that flips and caching might not provide much benefit.

Anecdotally, on a medium sized ecommerce store, AWS egress for product images was a huge cost.

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

#92

Post by Syonyk »

kccqzy wrote: post #67
Syonyk wrote: 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.

Man, some of the early "Google before they had their own DC" stories are epic, if you can get an SRE talking at some point.

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

#93

Post by theLiminator »

Syonyk wrote: post #78
theLiminator wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So... Why do you need such high availability that a rare power outage, network outage, or equipment failure is such a big deal? I ask having spent a lot of my college years (and some beyond) trying to run "enterprise grade uptime on a college student budget" - with the appropriate frustration. I've come around to a more casual, "As long as I can reasonably get it back up in a day or two, meh..." way of thinking about…

Customer trust is one of the most important assets, it's hard to earn, and once lost it's incredibly hard to get back.

Hosting your own infra makes that risk much higher. Especially if you're providing a critical path service.

I'm not saying that you need some overkill multi-region globally backed up setup, it definitely varies and depends on the nature of your business. If what you're doing works great for you, keep doing it!

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

#94

Post by marcus0x62 »

api wrote: post #22
ddorian43 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

Okay, then here's more: Hetzner, Datapacket, Hivelocity, Reliablesite, and OVH. I did pick them as an extreme example, but even the more expensive bare metal and colo providers are like 100X cheaper than cloud. VPS providers like Digital Ocean and Vultr are ~10X cheaper. Cloud sells egress bandwidth at an enormous markup. Meanwhile ingress is free. If this were a technical limitation ingress would be billed too becau…

> Cloud sells egress bandwidth at an enormous markup. Meanwhile ingress is free. If this were a technical limitation ingress would be billed too because there's nothing asymmetric about the Internet.

Symmetry is the entire problem.

1) to maintain settlement-free peering, you need traffic-symmetry. Amazon — on their own - transmits far more data than they receive. They benefit far more on this account from ingress traffic than more egress. Hence, the economic signal that ingress is free.

2) If you have unbalanced network traffic, your scaling factor becomes the transmit direction that is more heavily utilized. A 100gbps circuit can generally send and receive 100gbps simultaneously. But it can’t be used to send 150gbps and receive 50gbps. So if you have a bunch of people all wanting to transmit from your circuit far more than they receive, you have to upgrade your circuits and routers earlier than you otherwise would for a given aggregate amount of traffic. This is expensive, but adding more ingress traffic is free.

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

#95

Post by TheIronYuppie »

Hey everyone!

I'm David Aronchick - co-founder of Bacalhau[1] - and we are specifically building an open source platform to help with this. Basically, we allow you to do compute over data, making it much easier to schedule jobs (container, WASM, arbitrary binary) to where the data is being stored, even over irregular/unreliable networks. We were able to show 90%+ savings in things like log aggregations. Happy to answer any questions if you'd like!

David Aronchick aronchick@expanso.io

[1] https://github.com/bacalhau-project/bacalhau

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

#96

Post by hansvm »

mannyv wrote: post #24

Cloud bandwidth is cheap if you commit to spending a certain amount per month. Our bandwidth is less than .001/GB with like a $1500 monthly commitment in AWS. Fastly was even cheaper (which is why we're using fastly). Call you AM and talk. It's not hard, and it'll save you a ton of money.

You mean, cloud bandwidth is cheap if you don't use much bandwidth. That's still an order of magnitude or two worse than the backbone cost.

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

#97

Post by Obscurity4340 »

crazygringo wrote: post #74
Obscurity4340 wrote: post #59

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…

Here's the answer: because it's not written for just 2 devices. It's written to sync however many devices you want -- 3 or 4 or 5 or whatever. Both your phones, your tablet, your laptop, and your watch. And it has to sync when your devices might never actually be turned on at the same time. And you want it to sync when you're traveling, and you don't want to open your home firewall for security reasons. So it require…

I just feel like there's a middle ground like Resilio Sync where you have to share in ensuring you're syncing things but it can technically do the deed for you. You can even set an automation after you edit your calendar to trigger automatic/manual syncing. I feel like middle grounds like this or EteSync should be more predominant.

I would mind that since its local and I prefer to not be dependant on external hosting services wherever I can have a more accountable and static solution a little closer to home

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

#98

Post by andrenotgiant »

Aachen wrote: post #89
andrenotgiant wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Great question. "Free Bandwidth" is almost worse than cheap bandwidth because in reality it means: "Secret bandwidth pricing/limiting"

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

#99

Post by kiwijamo »

mannyv wrote: post #24

Cloud bandwidth is cheap if you commit to spending a certain amount per month. Our bandwidth is less than .001/GB with like a $1500 monthly commitment in AWS. Fastly was even cheaper (which is why we're using fastly). Call you AM and talk. It's not hard, and it'll save you a ton of money.

Is that something generally avaliable to customers? I've done some searches and can't find anything other than savings plans for EC2 etc.
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