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Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

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11–20 of 189 posts

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#12
post #10

Storage is cheap, but data transfer out is still $0.12/GB, over 10x more expensive than other options.

Not to disagree, but what other options? Google and Rackspace charge the same. DreamObjects charges $0.05/GB in transfer, but still charges $0.05 for storage. Azure is still the same $0.12/GB.

I don't disagree that $0.12/GB could be considered expensive, but S3's competitors seem to be charging the same.

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#14
post #10

Storage is cheap, but data transfer out is still $0.12/GB, over 10x more expensive than other options.

This was my take-away from the Google Cloud pricing changes yesterday. By reducing CPU costs, my bandwidth just becomes even more the dominant cost, so further reductions help me less and less.

AWS users will end up with the same problem in time. I wonder why the bandwidth costs are so subborn, does the cost price per traffic unit really never come down, or is someone (some people) in the infrastructure layer(s) screwing us?

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#15
post #13
post #10

Storage is cheap, but data transfer out is still $0.12/GB, over 10x more expensive than other options.

On the other hand, S3 EC2 transfer is free of bandwidth costs (there are still per-request costs though).

Also, inbound traffic is free.

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#18
post #9

Much expected after the GDrive prices got slashed. Currently I am only using S3 for hosting PDF or other big size files which are downloadable by the public, since the bandwidth is pay-as-go. However for regular storage, Dropbox/GDrive are still the primary choice, due to the fact, the data sync across devices, speaking of sync, what is holding Amazon back from a similar app for S3?

Gdrive is not a competitor to S3. Google Cloud Storage is.

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#19
post #10

Storage is cheap, but data transfer out is still $0.12/GB, over 10x more expensive than other options.

This was my take-away from the Google Cloud pricing changes yesterday. By reducing CPU costs, my bandwidth just becomes even more the dominant cost, so further reductions help me less and less. AWS users will end up with the same problem in time. I wonder why the bandwidth costs are so subborn, does the cost price per traffic unit really never come down, or is someone (some people) in the infrastructure layer(s) scre…

At the scale large providers operate at, they don't pay per GB, they pay at the 95th percentile for Gb/10Gb links.

It's the same way you pay a fixed hourly rate (in most cases) for your retail electricity, and your provider is paying wholesale spot market rates that can fluctuate in ~5 minute windows.

TL;DR You're paying for consistency and abstraction away from the underlying IP transport costs.

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#20
post #10

Storage is cheap, but data transfer out is still $0.12/GB, over 10x more expensive than other options.

In my opinion they're doing that on purpose to discourage people from using S3 as both a storage and a transfer method.

Storage and Delivery should be considered separate, as there are benefits to it being a separate service. If you throw a CDN between your customers and S3 you'll not only get a significantly lower cost, you'll also give your customers much better performance.

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