Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

kerkour.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 164 posts

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

#141

Post by inopinatus »

kkielhofner wrote: post #140
inopinatus wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author is just spitballing in their role as a Cloudflare shill. They don’t actually know jack shit about public cloud netops or pricing strategy. The so-called “bandwidth alliance” they spruik so hard is a negotiating vehicle for Cloudflare, intended to improve their position when haggling over peering, to support profitability of their DDoS protection service.

Where’s the profitability in the DDoS service? Even free accounts have had massive DDoS attacks mitigated - for free. There is no pricing anywhere in their portfolio for DDoS mitigation or bandwidth. Cloudflare sells a lot of products but DDoS protection isn’t one of them. It’s a hook to get users on the platform to potentially upsell later but if all you need is DDoS protection they provide it for free.

Enterprise DDoS protection is their goddamn flagship product. The Cloudflare website just says “call us”. That’s all. And it’s because E&G deals aren’t made through a website.

Read the 10-K before spouting off about what value creation a middleman provides, and how it captures that value as revenue. Consumer services are last on their list and given little space. Large customers are explicitly stated as Cloudflare’s sales focus. And the entire top of the list of their disclosed competitors is everyone who sells a WAF or network protection apparatus to that segment.

> they provide it for free

This is naive. As ever, if it’s free, that means you’re part of the product. For social media, as is well understood, that’s your eyeballs sold to advertisers. In the case of Cloudflare, it’s consumer traffic that they pass as a middleman, used to build peering leverage through sheer volume. The clearest confirmation of this, however, is still Cloudflare going to all the time and trouble to wrangle together an industry collective - the so-called “bandwidth alliance” - for the express purpose of driving down settlement-based peering fees.

They are not altruists. This is the architecture of their competitive advantage.

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

#142

Post by Intralexical »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #70
proteal wrote: 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…

GCP used to offer a simple type-a-number-here daily billing limit. For a small business or personal project you could even safely put it at something super low like $2/day (or much less), since their "Always Free" tier covered a decent amount of usage.

You can still do it, but they got rid of the special-cased Console setting and instead provided a migration snippet to programatically control it using one of their cloud run/automation features or another.

Ah, here's the page, I guess:

https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/budgets

Configuring a cap:

https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disa...

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

#143

Post by Intralexical »

lxgr wrote: post #118
Jach wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least AWS sort of provides tooling to approximate this. I have some alerts setup in CloudWatch for anomalous Network Out, estimated charges exceeding a threshold, and a raw Network Out limit that if exceeded shuts instances down. Overtime, bandwidth costs have gone down for AWS. What's finally causing me to think about jumping ship (surprised OP didn't mention OVH's unmetered stuff) is their upcoming pricing per m…

It's still absurd having to hand-craft that type of protection against racking up enormous bills, especially with cloud providers now actively promoting their various "free" tiers to hobbyists. It reminds me of EU roaming before the regulatory cap, when a single video call close to the border could cost you thousands of Euros.

The thing is that GCP used to have this, but then got rid of it a couple years ago. So is there really demand for it in most of their customers?

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

#144

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

Intralexical wrote: post #143
lxgr wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still absurd having to hand-craft that type of protection against racking up enormous bills, especially with cloud providers now actively promoting their various "free" tiers to hobbyists. It reminds me of EU roaming before the regulatory cap, when a single video call close to the border could cost you thousands of Euros.

The thing is that GCP used to have this, but then got rid of it a couple years ago. So is there really demand for it in most of their customers?

Google killing a product cannot be used to assess popularity. Especially if the product’s existence would potentially hurt revenue.

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

#145

Post by mannyv »

dilyevsky wrote: post #133
mannyv wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's your people suck at negotiating. Again, we got quotes from Fastly, Akamai, and AWS. Our commit is/was $1500/month (we're on fastly now). Fastly gave us like 6 month free to switch, both bandwidth and requests.

So you mean to tell me you negotiated roughly -99% their list with a 1.5k commit?

Our CEO did, yes. Again, just ask for a quote, and get quotes from other providers. It's literally just an email (or phone call).

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

#146

Post by danpalmer »

mlhpdx wrote: post #136
danpalmer wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fac…

Thank you, the e-commerce example is definitely something I hadn’t thought about. Having high quality imagery helps make sales but comes at a cost. Looking around at some sites I buy from, I think I can squint and see this “out in plain sight”.

In fact an interesting detail of the ecommerce image situation is that you can somewhat trade-off bandwidth and compute. Creating resized images is expensive (we had ~2m unique images viewed per month), but if you can resize an image down and compress it well you might save 80% of the bandwidth on it, and deliver a better UX due to faster images. We did a bit of modelling to figure out how many sizes we wanted to deliver in order to get the best compute/bandwidth trade-off. This can be tricky for many companies but we were in a weird position because we had a large catalog compared to order volume, because of how the business worked.

Video is an even better one. While we didn't have to deal with it in ecommerce, so many social applications are built around video. That doesn't necessarily mean YouTube/TikTok/etc, but also smaller things like BeReal who I'd guess are built entirely on cloud infra, even embedded videos in Mastodon posts. A similar thing could even be said about Podcasting/audio – not as bad as video, but there are specialist podcast hosts for a reason, and it's not that they do a great job, it's because they have cheap bandwidth.

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

#147

Post by andrewstuart »

dilyevsky wrote: post #108
omnimus wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The CTO of Cloudflare denied that.

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

#148

Post by kyriakos »

tekkk wrote: post #51

I wonder is There also is Hetzner and their dedicated servers. You pay for a server with a 1Gb/s connection and all egress is free. Unfortunately, I can't recommend them as each time I've tried to create an account, their abuse detection systems banned my account even before I had the occasion to enter a payment method. related to I've myself won the jackpot in the past on Netlify where I forgot to put a sleep in a w…

Been their customer for many years, I remember signing up online, no red flags in the process. Some years later signed up an account for a client as well again no problems.

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

#149

Post by weird-eye-issue »

withinboredom wrote: post #28
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Cloudflare offer it for free?

Um. It’s not. They have a free plan, but it’s subsidized by their paying customers.

I'm not saying Cloudflare is free

I'm saying they don't charge bandwidth

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

#150

Post by Intralexical »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #144
Intralexical wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that GCP used to have this, but then got rid of it a couple years ago. So is there really demand for it in most of their customers?

Google killing a product cannot be used to assess popularity. Especially if the product’s existence would potentially hurt revenue.

It can certainly raise questions about popularity, however, as long as you also adequately consider their tendency for rent-seeking, monopolistic behavior, etc.

In this specific case it's more that I'm having a hard time picturing serious "cloud"-based web companies that decide "Oh yeah sure we'll just shut our site down if we get too many visitors". That would mean this feature is useful primarily for hobbyists, which are more likely to be put off by (and react like they do to roaming phone charges to) uncapped costs (and also not a reliable source of revenue), weakening the revenue argument for removing the feature.

Post reply on HN