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AWS free tier data transfer expansion

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Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#61
post #17

Was only a matter of time after their egregious egress fees were exposed, 2 Cloudflare posts that help make this happen: https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/ https://www.cloudflare.com/press-releases/2021/cloudflare-an...

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…

I can confirm these $s

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#62
post #17

Was only a matter of time after their egregious egress fees were exposed, 2 Cloudflare posts that help make this happen: https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/ https://www.cloudflare.com/press-releases/2021/cloudflare-an...

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…

Interesting. Can you be more specific? Is it possible those prices are conflating different services, e.g. CDN vs network tunnels vs video streaming vs workers vs Pages vs object storage egress?

Even within just the CDN category, Cloudflare does a lot with its basic CDN offering (bot blocking, transformations, dynamic caching, etc.) that other vendors may charge as separate options.

That's not to say I don't believe you, I just wanted to make sure it's apples to apples.

Cloudflare's pricing model only really makes sense, IMO, if you're either a small/med business (which makes it an incredible deal) or if you're working cloud-native using their edge functions (workers, pages, etc.). If you're primarily using them to shield and proxy a LAMP monolith or similar for a large number of users, yeah, I can see how that would get expensive really quickly. There are other vendors who specialize only in that, being a dumb CDN. Cloudflare's value is that they enable completely new architectures based on their network topology... you can't easily do something like that on Fastly, for example.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#63
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS giving you 95GB egress for free is not at all a direct answer to the insane prices

Just because it isn't as good doesn't mean it's not a direct answer. This is basically the lowest hanging fruit response AWS can give against Cloudflare to convince people not to migrate over. Maybe the idea is that if you're doing 1+ TB of CloudFront traffic, you're already deeply locked into AWS anyways and less willing to make the jump anyways.

1GB of egress costs about 9 cents.

The cost savings is equivalent to ~$9/mo in standard US regions. Nobody is going to migrate clouds over a $9/mo saving.

If we're talking about CloudFront that comes out to $85. That's actually a pretty good savings, but it's distinct from egress. CloudFront's pricing isn't locking customers in due to egress pricing because it's a CDN, not a data storage service.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#64

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.

I don't think AWS's billing system is robust enough for that. In pure AWS fashion you have to create a billing alarm, which pushed an event to SNS which triggers a lambda to shut down your stuff but it is possible. The catch is that billing metrics are estimates and alarms might be delayed.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#66
post #44

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.

The solution is to not use AWS. Is is not a sacrifice to not engage with shady companies.

Paying for what you use, the peak of shady business practices!

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#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 for all cloud providers.

I'm literally using them less because this isn't a feature they offer. Even the free tier of AWS is too risky without hard limits.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#68
post #39

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.

It has been a while since I messed with the AWS panel, but IIRC you can set budget alerts so you’re notified once a threshold is crossed. It’s not a perfect solution, but if you expect to spend $0 then an alert on $0.01 is pretty trivial to set up and goes a long way to prevent end of the month surprises.

It’s not a perfect solution

It's not a solution at all given the fact the alerting process can lag behind the logging process by several hours or more. If you've hit a traffic spike it could have rolled over your site and gone in that time, leaving you with a bug bill.

Alerts are not a viable solution to traffic spikes unless they're real-time and absolutely bulletproof. AWS's alerting is neither.

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#69

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.

Also the AWS free tier expires after 12 months (unlike, say, GCP).

AWS has both 12 months free tiers for some services, as well as pretty generous always-free offerings, like the data transfer announcement today. The 1TB/mo CloudFront traffic is now always free, as is the 100GB/mo of data per month from AWS regions to the Internet.

https://aws.amazon.com/free/

Re: AWS free tier data transfer expansion

#70

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…

Digital Ocean could be interesting. Used to AWS and Azure but DO is doing great too
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