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AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

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Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#102
post #6

Is there a plausible explanation why egress fees from cloud providers costs around $0.1/GB? "Traditional" server providers such as Hetzner are able to offer bandwidth at orders of magnitude lower price (eg. $1.1/TB). I understand that cloud providers may have better interconnects or better uptimes, but that doesn't justify the magnitudes higher pricing.

Also Hetzner offers hosting that works sometimes/ maybe. I only consider it a viable option in the earliest days of starting a project.

I have few dedicated and few vps there, this year I had less than 5 minutes of downtime on 1 of the vps and 100 % uptime for all the rest, do you have more details about your experience?

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#103
post #97
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of them (AWS, GCP, Azure) are priced outrageously compared to high quality, well peered, bandwidth.

GCP is pretty good though. Cold-potato, very fat backbone, and very good presence at a ton of PoPs. When using GCP you basically have the same global, high-bandwidth direct connectivity presence that Google uses for its products, and that is very difficult to match by traditional T1 ISPs.

Ok, help me out: "cold-potato"? :D

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#104
post #38
post #6

Is there a plausible explanation why egress fees from cloud providers costs around $0.1/GB? "Traditional" server providers such as Hetzner are able to offer bandwidth at orders of magnitude lower price (eg. $1.1/TB). I understand that cloud providers may have better interconnects or better uptimes, but that doesn't justify the magnitudes higher pricing.

Disclaimer: I worked on an AWS service team. This is, oddly enough, similar to a debate people have about consumers TV or Internet: should pricing be "unlimited" or "a la carte"? AWS is combining all your networking charges into one lump "outgoing data transfer" fee. So it's heavily marked up in comparison to what they're paying for the outgoing data transfer, and you're not sure how much is profit vs. whether it's g…

The bandwidth alliance has a response to this approach: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/09/26/cloudflare_bandwidt...

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#106
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say it’d be an improvement but I can’t actually make sense of the AWS Snowball proving https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/pricing/

The pricing seems relatively clear: A flat fee for the act of a human getting the data onto the physical medium ($200) + the cost of shipping ( So if your getting out 30 TB of data that's $200 + ~$100 + ($0.03 * 30000) = ~$1200

I was confused by the “Standard Amazon S3 storage and request pricing applies.” That seems to be a different thing from the extra S3 transfer costs.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#107
post #38
post #6

Is there a plausible explanation why egress fees from cloud providers costs around $0.1/GB? "Traditional" server providers such as Hetzner are able to offer bandwidth at orders of magnitude lower price (eg. $1.1/TB). I understand that cloud providers may have better interconnects or better uptimes, but that doesn't justify the magnitudes higher pricing.

Disclaimer: I worked on an AWS service team. This is, oddly enough, similar to a debate people have about consumers TV or Internet: should pricing be "unlimited" or "a la carte"? AWS is combining all your networking charges into one lump "outgoing data transfer" fee. So it's heavily marked up in comparison to what they're paying for the outgoing data transfer, and you're not sure how much is profit vs. whether it's g…

"I think AWS's billing is probably already on the falling side of diminishing marginal returns. That is, it's complex enough that more information would tend to hinder customers from getting the best price. Right now, if I plan to reduce my data charges, I have one variable to tinker with."

No, it's two variables - the egress charges you refer to and the actual cost to store the data.

We[1] have found that it is, as you might expect, quite a bit simpler to charge for just the storage and forget about metering the usage/bandwidth/transfer.

So we have typically had our price point higher than the B2s or Wasabis of the world, but there's just one simple number to think about - and no potential for surprises in the billing.

I will admit to having a bit of concern over adding 'rclone'[2] to our platform and the potential for users to just burn bandwidth using an rsync.net account as a "transfer host" but that is why we peer with he.net and their cheap an plentiful 10gb pipes.

[1] rsync.net

[2] ssh user@rsync.net rclone s3:/bucket gdrive:/blah/blah

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#108
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GCP is pretty good though. Cold-potato, very fat backbone, and very good presence at a ton of PoPs. When using GCP you basically have the same global, high-bandwidth direct connectivity presence that Google uses for its products, and that is very difficult to match by traditional T1 ISPs.

Ok, help me out: "cold-potato"? :D

It is the inverse of “hot potato” routing where the network tries to get rid of a packet as soon as possible (that is, drop a hot potato). Cold potato means the network keeps the packet on-network as long as it can.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon has gone one step past that and made the shovels expensive too. The fear of buying a computer has made them billions.

It's not just the fear of buying a computer, it's also the fear of hiring staff...

I don't think Amazon really provides any products that are going to prevent you from hiring staff. That's the domain of companies like Zendesk or Salesforce.

All they provide you is the bare metal in easily-purchasable quantities. Whatever time you saved not having to lug a server up to your datacenter and plug it in will be spent debugging CloudFormation stacks or figuring out how to auction off your reserved instances that you no longer want.

Re: AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data

#110
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GCP is pretty good though. Cold-potato, very fat backbone, and very good presence at a ton of PoPs. When using GCP you basically have the same global, high-bandwidth direct connectivity presence that Google uses for its products, and that is very difficult to match by traditional T1 ISPs.

Ok, help me out: "cold-potato"? :D

Vs "hot potato"

Hold onto the packet for as long as you can vs hand it off to your peer as quickly as possible.

Most networks do "hot", Google does "cold" since their network is almost always better than that of the peer.

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