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

AWS free tier data transfer expansion

aws.amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 175 posts

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#141

Post by windexh8er »

slownews45 wrote: post #134
windexh8er wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really would love if folks talking about volatile AWS prices would actually give examples. There was never any mention of "volatile" pricing. Egregious? Yes. Volatile? No. There's a significant difference of meaning with those words. Here's a perfect example [0] by Corey Quinn. > So inform us of the uncertainty with AWS. I didn't mention "uncertainty with AWS". I mentioned that there is no more certainty with AWS…

Let's be crystal crystal clear here. If I host a high data use video site on AWS, I can calculate what my costs will be. That provides me some certainty with respect to a business plan. Even better, AWS does have a history that is much better than others in terms of pricing stability. This doesn't mean best price. Can you say the same about cloudflare? No. Can you say the same about oracle? No - they have a miserable…

It is crystal clear that this comment validates the misunderstanding of how bandwidth is priced in the real world and how, just because Amazon's price model has been reliable, that it must be a viable cost because people pay it. It's unfortunate that the reality you're basing this comment on is so far off base that you've convinced yourself AWS egress fees are somehow "stable". It's also very interesting that you're stating Cloudflare is under some unforeseen "pressure" because they're not turning a profit today. I would gather you're assuming Cloudflare is being soaked by infrastructure costs, which is completely incorrect, as they build out their pivot towards targeting the enterprise market by investing in their field (sales) and continually reinvesting in R&D.

It's also fantastic to read the misconceptions of the "value" AWS is providing. In some cases they do provide a much greater value over cost ratio, but if you've convinced yourself that blindly for AWS proper as a whole - boy do I feel for you the day you realize the economic advantage they manipulate to monopolize the cloud market, and not for the greater good of their customers.

Clear pricing you say? I'll use Corey Quinn (The Duckbill Group [0]) as an example again - his entire liveihood and business runs on the fact that AWS pricing is not even remotely clear. It's laughable that anyone would publicly make that statement at this point in time knowing what we know. Sure, if you're running a static site on S3 for a few users a month I'm sure you've got it covered. For those of us dealing with large scale enterprise everything stated here is, at best, bending the truth and at worst flat out ignorance.

[0] https://www.duckbillgroup.com/

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#142

Post by xfer »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #12
shepherdjerred wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but then you have to use Oracle

I've used Oracle Cloud, and it's actually pretty nice and well-designed at least from my point of view. It gives the AWS Dashboard a run for their m̵o̵n̵e̵y̵ egress fees. But I still don't run anything important on it or push the limits of the free tier. Oracle doesn't have a good reputation. Also "Oracle Unbreakable Linux" is literally just RHEL rebranded, but it's not a community project and they don't like to ackn…

I also have an arm machine hosted, good if you want to compile stuff, but the networking has been super flaky and unreliable. I would definitely not call their service nice, when quite often you can't login because network issues. Also their separate identity(legacy stuff)/cloud service dashboard was also confusing.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#143

Post by stillicidious »

windexh8er wrote: post #141
slownews45 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be crystal crystal clear here. If I host a high data use video site on AWS, I can calculate what my costs will be. That provides me some certainty with respect to a business plan. Even better, AWS does have a history that is much better than others in terms of pricing stability. This doesn't mean best price. Can you say the same about cloudflare? No. Can you say the same about oracle? No - they have a miserable…

It is crystal clear that this comment validates the misunderstanding of how bandwidth is priced in the real world and how, just because Amazon's price model has been reliable, that it must be a viable cost because people pay it. It's unfortunate that the reality you're basing this comment on is so far off base that you've convinced yourself AWS egress fees are somehow "stable". It's also very interesting that you're…

> his entire liveihood and business runs on the fact that AWS pricing is not even remotely clear

Corey's business exists because prevailing engineering culture encourages pretty much the entire industry to consider optimization as an afterthought, not because engineers can't understand AWS pricing, or interpret a few bar charts in Cost Explorer, and in the face of a deadline, if it's not on the agile board everyone knows it doesn't exist.

Many of Corey's technical posts are around finding sweet technical substitutes for niche use cases, but as I'm sure he'll tell you, 80% of what he does is easily discovered a few clicks away from the AWS home page.

> as they build out their pivot towards targeting the enterprise market

Cloudflare have a solid sales pipeline, but they're a sitting duck if any of the big clouds ever decide to replicate the business model like-for-like. One of the reasons this may not have happened yet is because Cloudflare's whole presentation is consumer oriented, starting with domain configuration management that is hell to version correctly when 20 people have access to the account. Outside some sweet Javascript cold start hacks they basically have no moat, and there are far more situations that could send the company into desperate measures than otherwise.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#144

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

ignoramous wrote: post #58
stillicidious wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen Cloudflare Enterprise accounts for two clients, the current one is paying the equivalent of $0.035/GB, the other was substantially higher although I've forgotten the numbers. Equivalent pricing from another vendor for the same service with enterprise support was $0.0021/GB. Their free bandwidth promises are grossly overstated, and possibly even a marketing fabrication, given previous reports here and elsewh…

We save 7TB per mo egress because of Cloudflare's free cache (through Workers) and pay nothing for it. Granted Cloudflare, the CDN, has Enterprise plans for higher TB bandwidth (esp video), but Cloudflare, the Cloud platform, has more than generous free-tier, batteries included. AWS' value-based pricing has them extract fees for things as trivial as builds and deploys, and their bills are nothing but nightmare to par…

> We save 7TB per mo egress because of Cloudflare's free cache (through Workers) and pay nothing for it.

That's huge, Could you explain a bit more on how you achieve that? I've been exploring Cloudflare cache, AFAIK for anything not cached by default you need a special page rule e.g. for .html, I tried a wildcard domain.com/* and it doesn't seem to make any difference. Are you using workers to cache specific file types?

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#145

Post by KronisLV »

Someone1234 wrote: post #67

So which cloud provider offers a HARD spend limit? I just want to fund my account e.g. $20/month and never, ever, spend a cent over that. Even if my account gets hacked for bitcoin mining or whatever, I don't want to spend a cent over that. With AWS, you can do it, via a trigger on a spend notification and a script, but the whole thing is a giant kludge. It should be a default feature. It should be a default feature…

> So which cloud provider offers a HARD spend limit?

It still baffles me that this isn't the default. Then again, egress/ingress costs also baffle me, why not just offer capped speed and unlimited bandwidth?

I doubt that i'll ever willingly use a platform that i pay for myself, which can just decide to charge me bunches of money because of my site/app getting DDoS'ed (assuming not all components are fully protected at the edge or something) or suddenly gaining popularity.

In my eyes, such scalability should be opt in (or at least opt out) and by default my apps should just break under the load, much like any self-hosted software would, which may be preferable in some circumstances (e.g. API manages backpressure as best as it can, once request queues fill up, it just gives "503 Service Unavailable" with something like "Retry-After" and any clients/front ends are supposed to show messages to try again later, or automatically retry after a while).

To that end, here's a list of providers that give you such fixed resources (in this case VPSes) and that i personally have used in the past:

• Time4VPS: https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294 (currently hosts most of my sites, hence affiliate link)

• Contabo: https://contabo.com/en/

• Hetzner: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud

• Scaleway: https://www.scaleway.com/en/elements/

• Vultr: https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/

• DigitalOcean: https://www.digitalocean.com/products/droplets/

Of course, some of those also offer managed services, but in my eyes it's far safer to just run MySQL/MariaDB/PostgreSQL/MongoDB/Redis and any other piece of software in Docker (or OCI compatible) containers, as opposed to using something proprietary, even with protocol compatibility. That way, it's also possible to migrate between providers easily, should the need arise.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#146

Post by ignoramous »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #144
ignoramous wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We save 7TB per mo egress because of Cloudflare's free cache (through Workers) and pay nothing for it. Granted Cloudflare, the CDN, has Enterprise plans for higher TB bandwidth (esp video), but Cloudflare, the Cloud platform, has more than generous free-tier, batteries included. AWS' value-based pricing has them extract fees for things as trivial as builds and deploys, and their bills are nothing but nightmare to par…

> We save 7TB per mo egress because of Cloudflare's free cache (through Workers) and pay nothing for it. That's huge, Could you explain a bit more on how you achieve that? I've been exploring Cloudflare cache, AFAIK for anything not cached by default you need a special page rule e.g. for .html, I tried a wildcard domain.com/* and it doesn't seem to make any difference. Are you using workers to cache specific file typ…

> Are you using workers to cache specific file types?

Yes: Using Workers as an api gateway and the Cache API as CDN.

[0] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/learning/how-the-c...

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#147

Post by johnthreevolts »

RobMurray wrote: post #137
Epskampie wrote: post #20

AWS free tier is horrible. You have to enter a creditcard to sign up, and then there is no way to prevent it being charged when you go over the limit for some reason. If you get on the frontpage of HN for example, you might be majorly screwed. It's a test account, I just want it to shut down when the limit is reached.

Off topic, but Oracle cloud's free tier never charges unless you upgrade your account. You can have 5 VMs, 200 GB block storage, etc.

Only 4, not 5. Because each instance requires boot volume of minimal 50GB size. And free tier gives you 200GB of volume. I've tried to setup fifth instance but received obscure errors, till I realized that there is not enough space for boot volume. Also there is no possibility to create smaller boot volume or decrease size of already existing volume. Have I miss-looked something?

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#148

Post by Abishek_Muthian »

ignoramous wrote: post #146
Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We save 7TB per mo egress because of Cloudflare's free cache (through Workers) and pay nothing for it. That's huge, Could you explain a bit more on how you achieve that? I've been exploring Cloudflare cache, AFAIK for anything not cached by default you need a special page rule e.g. for .html, I tried a wildcard domain.com/* and it doesn't seem to make any difference. Are you using workers to cache specific file typ…

> Are you using workers to cache specific file types? Yes: Using Workers as an api gateway and the Cache API as CDN. [0] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/learning/how-the-c...

Thanks, what type of files do you serve through that?

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#149

Post by stunt »

ignoramous wrote: post #58
stillicidious wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen Cloudflare Enterprise accounts for two clients, the current one is paying the equivalent of $0.035/GB, the other was substantially higher although I've forgotten the numbers. Equivalent pricing from another vendor for the same service with enterprise support was $0.0021/GB. Their free bandwidth promises are grossly overstated, and possibly even a marketing fabrication, given previous reports here and elsewh…

We save 7TB per mo egress because of Cloudflare's free cache (through Workers) and pay nothing for it. Granted Cloudflare, the CDN, has Enterprise plans for higher TB bandwidth (esp video), but Cloudflare, the Cloud platform, has more than generous free-tier, batteries included. AWS' value-based pricing has them extract fees for things as trivial as builds and deploys, and their bills are nothing but nightmare to par…

What Cloudflare misses is a simple cost calculator. I don't want to contact sales for it.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#150

Post by ignoramous »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #148
ignoramous wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you using workers to cache specific file types? Yes: Using Workers as an api gateway and the Cache API as CDN. [0] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/learning/how-the-c...

Thanks, what type of files do you serve through that?

executables, raw binary files (like apache parquet), and (rarely) json.
Post reply on HN