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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

#101

Post by Aachen »

stickfigure wrote: post #40

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…

General question, can we just call object storage object storage? If there's going to be another provider after already remembering S3, B2, now R2, on top of the various aliases for products like virtual servers, shared hosting, VLANs, and other things people are presenting as new products with the most random of abbreviations, I'm really going to lose track.

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

#102

Post by baq »

goldinfra wrote: post #8

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.

You see egress with extra steps, I see billing for work relevant to my business and my customers

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

#103

Post by bnprks »

CodesInChaos wrote: post #12

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.

Agree 100%. I've always found it surprising there isn't a requirement for symmetric bandwidth charges. I think it's fine if AWS wants to have expensive bandwidth, but having free ingress + exorbitant egress seems like a transparent attempt at preventing customers from partial migrations to competitors.

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

#104

Post by crazygringo »

Obscurity4340 wrote: post #97
crazygringo wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But almost nobody wants that middle ground. That's a tiny, tiny, tiny minority.

I, and everyone I know, wants something that always works, all the time, no matter where they are, that they never have to think about.

Not something that they "have to share in ensuring", not something they need to "set an automation". For almost everyone, external hosting services are a feature rather than a dependency, because homes are subject to fires and natural disasters. And nobody wants to deal with finding a friend across town who will host your backup NAS that you'll set up and periodically maintain.

There's just no market for it from any major consumer company.

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

#105

Post by api »

marcus0x62 wrote: post #94
api wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tra…

Assuming that's all true, it still doesn't explain the magnitude of the markup. VPS providers can do $0.01/gig outbound almost across the board. This includes some very large ones, and because bandwidth is cheap there people tend to host a lot of high bandwidth things there.

GCP, AWS, etc. are roughly 10X more expensive than this. Are they 10X better?

The cost is very high. I can't stress this enough. A terabyte outbound at AWS is roughly $80. For around $300/month I can get 1gbps unmetered at a highly regarded high quality bare metal provider and transmit well over 200TiB in a month. I know because I've done it continuously for years. It works fine. That means AWS is marking up bandwidth by at least 50X at a minimum.

(The above are rough numbers, but they capture the magnitude of the difference.)

If what you say is true and the markup is reasonable then all these companies should be out of business. Either that or they're overselling bandwidth by a giant margin, but that doesn't check out because they specifically advertise as places to put your extremely high bandwidth work loads. If your business model depends on people not doing X, don't advertise as a place for people to do X.

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

#106

Post by andersa »

stickfigure wrote: post #40

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…

You kinda pay in reduced performance. For example, civitai uses r2 for delivering the images, and it frequently doesn't load at all for me or very slowly.

When your users have to use a VPN to move their traffic to another Cloudflare data center so the site actually loads, something is wrong...

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

#107

Post by bcrosby95 »

_jal wrote: post #80
swatcoder wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's been true during recent flush years, where money was cheap and nobody really cared, but there are signs all over the place that the attitude is changing. Everything that used to be free is being monetized and everything that was monetized is seeing increased prices. We should expect that these sort of implicit affordances are being trimmed as well, or at least that they're likely to be soon.

Yeah, I rather suspect they'll be much less forgiving of this sort of thing in the future. All that takes is a lean quarter and some MBA to coin a term for rookie mistake-windfalls, and they will come to feel entitled to revenue from it.

Bob, I see the collateral spend of your clients is down this quarter. Can we see that bump up a bit? Mmmmkay that would be great. Thanks. Good talk.

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

#108

Post by dilyevsky »

omnimus wrote: post #83
buggeryorkshire wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Delivering video will instantly promote you to their business plan where you are charged

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

#109

Post by api »

tyingq wrote: post #18
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.

That's the list price. You don't pay the list price if you purchase at high volume. Bare metal and VPS providers are surely very high volume customers.

This is perhaps an argument against pure DIY colo, but most small scale colo isn't connected "naked" to the Internet but gets racked in a data center that offers a bandwidth package and does peering for you. The only people who peer directly tend to be clouds, bare metal hosts, CDNs, and ISPs. Even if you have your own IP space and an ASN you are usually behind someone who is bulk purchasing transit and handling peering.

To be fair very large customers can negotiate costs down at cloud providers too, but you have to be spending tens of thousands a month to even have a chance at getting their attention for any kind of special deal.

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

#110

Post by tyingq »

api wrote: post #109
tyingq wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's the list price. You don't pay the list price if you purchase at high volume. Bare metal and VPS providers are surely very high volume customers. This is perhaps an argument against pure DIY colo, but most small scale colo isn't connected "naked" to the Internet but gets racked in a data center that offers a bandwidth package and does peering for you. The only people who peer directly tend to be clouds, bare me…

It's probably the closest proxy for which you can get meaningful numbers.
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