I had no idea it was this crazy expensive. I can host a 1 TB folder of movies on my Google Fiber internet Synology NAS website, and let my friend download it for free. But if I hosted my website on Google Cloud, they bill me $111.60? How are these cloud services getting away with this pricing?
Cloud Egress Costs
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Re: Cloud Egress Costs
#22Isn’t this what makes cloudflare’s R2 a great proposition? No egress costs with very competitive storage and operation pricing. It’s not as mature as the others, I don’t believe you can use your own encryption key for example, but why would anyone starting out not choose R2? Hopefully they push the market in their direction.
I offloaded all heavy files (videos and GIFs) to R2 and serve them on my web app. I reckon I save at least $240/yearly (12*$20) compared to serving them through Vercel. I didn't expect mere static files being such a cost factor.
Re: Cloud Egress Costs
#23> Cloudflare -- Free
Perhaps on self-serve plans with insignificant traffic. On enterprise plans they do set bandwidth caps. Our company exceeded our bandwidth cap and our account rep reached out to reprice our contract.
I asked him if turning off Argo (a service billed by bandwidth) would remove the bandwidth overage and they said no.
TlDR: Cloudflare bandwidth isn’t free at the enterprise tier.
Re: Cloud Egress Costs
#24The cost of egress traffic is a very good reason for many organizations to not fully migrate to a cloud provider anytime soon. And since, unlike with storage costs, there doesn't seem to be an actual reason (other than: it makes migrating to competitors cost-prohibitive in a subset of cases), that seems kind of... weird? Small example: an actual company I do some work for is in the business of delivering creative ass…
It really depends on the quality of the peering you expect. It doesn't matter, until it does. Consumer ISPs sometimes do their utmost to not peer with open exchanges, and the entire thing gets even more complex when you go to places where bandwidth is more expensive (i.e. Oceania).
There's a reason the favorite chart to exemplify value Cloudflare reps like to show is Argo Smart Routing, and why it costs about $100 per TB just like AWS and GCP.
Re: Cloud Egress Costs
#25The cost of egress traffic is a very good reason for many organizations to not fully migrate to a cloud provider anytime soon. And since, unlike with storage costs, there doesn't seem to be an actual reason (other than: it makes migrating to competitors cost-prohibitive in a subset of cases), that seems kind of... weird? Small example: an actual company I do some work for is in the business of delivering creative ass…
My feeling is that egress is easily measured, so it's where costs that are hard to assess get moved to.
It doesn't feel great to be line item billed for stuff at 10x the rate of credible other offers.
I think there is also some geo-specific pricing that gets hidden in a global price; bandwidth can be a lot more expensive in some locations than others and if you are charged 5x for egress in south america, nobody will use the south america locations and that's not good for business.
Re: Cloud Egress Costs
#26The cost of egress traffic is a very good reason for many organizations to not fully migrate to a cloud provider anytime soon. And since, unlike with storage costs, there doesn't seem to be an actual reason (other than: it makes migrating to competitors cost-prohibitive in a subset of cases), that seems kind of... weird? Small example: an actual company I do some work for is in the business of delivering creative ass…
I saw a hilarious fuck up a few months ago. Company sets up an AWS hosted always on VPN solution. Connects 1000 staff through it. Celebrates how they saved $50k on the VPN solution. Gets $25k AWS bill for the just the first month of egress traffic. Turns out the data was leaving AWS egress three separate times.
Re: Cloud Egress Costs
#27Offt, not a good look for Railway, Render or Vercel!
Re: Cloud Egress Costs
#28AWS's egress needs to decrease by 100x before it will make sense for me to use them.
Re: Cloud Egress Costs
#29I think the overview is missing a column of what data is actually allowed for 'free' egress. Iirc eg Cloudflare does not allow videos etc. as part of their free tier. edit: confused ingress and egress
We’re talking about egress - traffic leaving the network. Due to traffic patterns and other reasons (Hotel California) ingress is always free, egress is charged. There is some debate about the status of hosting video when using Cloudflare as a CDN. These comparisons are for hosts/object store. Cloudflare R2 has no restrictions on the type of content while not charging for egress.
sorry , I typed too fast and meant egress
Re: Cloud Egress Costs
#30The cost of egress traffic is a very good reason for many organizations to not fully migrate to a cloud provider anytime soon. And since, unlike with storage costs, there doesn't seem to be an actual reason (other than: it makes migrating to competitors cost-prohibitive in a subset of cases), that seems kind of... weird? Small example: an actual company I do some work for is in the business of delivering creative ass…
Definitely lucrative enough. The use case you've described isn't particularly uncommon, but lots of companies just pay for the egress.
The problem is that there are now multiple generations of software engineers that do not know how bandwidth is priced. They've only used managed providers that charge per unit of ingress/egress, at some fractional dollar per GB.