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Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

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Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#131

Post by computer »

copergi wrote: post #24
TillE wrote: post #10

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

What "other options"? You mean sketchy "free 9000 exabytes/month of bandwidth" low end hosting places like hetzner? Those are not alternatives to AWS or azure or google cloud. And those bandwidth costs do not reflect reality, they assume most people use almost none of that bandwidth. The bandwidth still costs the same, just the big users are getting the small users to pay for their bandwidth costs.

There's a fair number of hosts where you simply get a 10, 100 or 1000mbps port and then use it for unlimited traffic. As long as the provider doesn't pay per MB, there's no issue in filling it up. The main difference with places like S3 is that S3 has great peering arrangements all over the world, whereas such a host probably has worse peering to some places.

But I did ~50 TB of traffic per month at various hosts for <$20 without any issue. Just choose them well, and know exactly what kind of connection they offer.

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#132

Post by lnanek2 »

mkempe wrote: post #27

Given costs of storage and data center operations, what's the lowest, commoditization-bound on standard Amazon S3 prices? Now they're reducing to a narrow $27.50-30.00/TB-month, from the current $43-85/TB-month. I've seen Internet Archive and Backblaze estimates that indicate $60-100/TB-storage installation and $7/TB-year in power. If drives last 5 years, we could expect a commodity cloud-storage price around $20/TB-…

Amazon is well known for losing money to capture market anyway, so I wouldn't put break even as their limit.

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#134

Post by yeukhon »

beering wrote: post #127
yeukhon wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small yes. Large bill wasn't so easy. Once I had an excess $40 added to my bill after a network attack. I was able to down to $10 after a few emails back and forth. Another time I had something low like $10 and they credit me right away without problem. Depends on how large your bill...

You live in a very different world from me if a "large bill" is an extra $40. For even a small company like who I work for, any fluctuations in our AWS bill under $100 would probably go unnoticed. Our total infrastructure cost (of which AWS is a small part) is in 5 digits.

Personal website of course it would be a big sum...

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#135

Post by teraflop »

chris_mahan wrote: post #53
balls187 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While not the best solution, you can call Amazon, speak to someone to have your "surprise" bill mitigated. This is 1st hand information from a AWS Rep I once dated.

That is so wrong it's not funny. Call? Isn't our use of computers predicated on the notion that we don't want to do manual labor?

Personally, I find it hilarious that a simple verbal interaction with another human being is now categorized as "manual labor".

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#136

Post by ghshephard »

programminggeek wrote: post #11

Nothing should ever be announced or "effective" April 1.

There is precedent around making big announcements on April 1st, with full understanding of the impact of announcing on that day:

https://www.google.com/search?q=founding+date+apple&oq=found...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#137

Post by balls187 »

yeukhon wrote: post #110
balls187 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While not the best solution, you can call Amazon, speak to someone to have your "surprise" bill mitigated. This is 1st hand information from a AWS Rep I once dated.

Small yes. Large bill wasn't so easy. Once I had an excess $40 added to my bill after a network attack. I was able to down to $10 after a few emails back and forth. Another time I had something low like $10 and they credit me right away without problem. Depends on how large your bill...

According to her, she would routinely have one-time massive fee's credited ($1000+).

I'd assume since it's a spike in costs, Amazon has more interest in keeping you as a customer, at your much lower typical usage, than to have you abandon, even if you have a huge bill.

Obviously if this was a typical problem, you would need to rethink your architecture and infrastructure needs.

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#138

Post by balls187 »

chris_mahan wrote: post #53
balls187 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While not the best solution, you can call Amazon, speak to someone to have your "surprise" bill mitigated. This is 1st hand information from a AWS Rep I once dated.

That is so wrong it's not funny. Call? Isn't our use of computers predicated on the notion that we don't want to do manual labor?

Sat next to a businessperson on a flight to Vegas, and he was opining that "schmoozing" is becoming a lost art.

I'm all for being able to initiate billing inquiries online--in fact, I'm ditching Bank of America because I can't dispute charges on line.

But in Amazon's case, this isn't a dispute, rather this is asking them to forgive a (hopefully) one time transgression, which is much easier to do by speaking to someone, than filling out a form.

I find it similar to haggling for a temporary reprieve in my fantastically high cable bill.

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#139

Post by rjurney »

computer wrote: post #119
seanmccann wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's no different than startups of the past having to pay thousands to millions of dollars to setup servers. These days those same servers can be setup in minutes for a fraction of the cost. Timing is everything. Sometimes the current market pricing for a commodity is too expensive to make your business viable today but in the future that will not be the case. Just depends how long that will take.

If S3 storage pricing was the issue for this startup they could always have gone with their own dedicated servers for storage for a fraction of the cost. For that reason, I doubt a lower S3 cost would have prevented them from shutting down.

Fraction of the cost long-term. Not short term, where they found themselves.

Re: Amazon S3 Pricing Changes Effective April 1, 2014

#140

Post by crucialfelix »

robbles wrote: post #52
thomaslangston wrote: post #8

My concern is what it always been for AWS, no first party support for limiting my bill. The best effort from AWS is just an email notification when they "think" my bill is over a limit. If I can't limit my risk to a surprise bill of thousands of dollars after missing a midnight email, I still can't use their service at any usage based price other than free.

You actually can do this yourself quite readily, through use of CloudWatch billing metrics (which can be broken down by individual service). Define some alarms based on billing thresholds, and perform automated scaling actions in response. AWS can't exactly do this for you, as explained by previous commenters, but they do give you the basic features you'd need for implementing it.

There is a newrelic plugin that does this. It can graph your costs and raise alerts.

AWS Costs & Usage Analytics http://www.newvem.com/new-relic/

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