

AWS Price Reductions and Free Inbound Data Transfer - jeffbarr
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2009/12/aws-price-reductions.html

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PanMan
I guess they buy their bandwidth symmetrically. Thus, as long as they have
more outgoing traffic they can charge for, giving incoming away for free
doesn't really 'cost' them much (off-course the do lose income on this, but
not real costs). It's still nice tho! :)

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pierrefar
The free inbound transfer is NOT permanent. From the post:

"Finally, we are waiving the inbound data transfer fee across the board (for
all services) through the end of June 2010."

It's nice, but let's not kid ourselves about its awesomeness.

Prediction: at the end of June, they'll magically realize that they can do
this permanently and they fix the free inbound traffic, or at least have a
healthy free amount before payment is started. This means there will be
another round of news for them.

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felixmar
The free inbound transfer is obviously a reaction to Microsoft's pricing.
Windows Azure has free inbound transfer during off-peak hours until June 30
(see <http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/faq/#pricing>).

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aristus
Just a friendly word of caution: such a huge price differential (0 cents in vs
~15 cents out per GB) is a kind of lockin.

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simon_kun
It would be nice if they included PUT's into this equation too. Many large
datasets are not one big file, but billions of smaller ones.

I realise it raises the offering out of the bandwidth arena and into actual
server capacity to handle the PUT's, but offering free bandwidth in and still
charging per PUT action is kinda misleading (and could really ruin someones
day if they read it wrong)

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ryanwaggoner
Making inbound data transfer free really makes sense if they're charging you
to store it and every time you access it.

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tlrobinson
It's across all services though, not just S3. Right?

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scootklein
i guess free inbound is cool if you're using S3 as just a huge backup dump for
all of your stuff, but it would seem that running any sort of web app that
serves as a public customer interface wouldn't benefit much at all from free
inbound

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blantonl
I run an online streaming service for public safety communications, and our
inbound traffic is close to 4TB/m - this saves me over $1000 a month.

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dnsworks
At any reasonable scale, S3 bandwidth is still a magnitude more expensive than
you would pay at an aggressive dedicated server company like ServerBeach,
ThePlanet, 10tb.com, or SoftLayer. It's also even worse when you compare it to
discount bandwidth offerings like Cogent's $1,500 for a GigE (which comes out
to $0.0075/GB) or Hurricane Electric's $3k price for a GigE connection.

What Amazon is really doing here is the classic ISP inbound/outbound juggling
act amongst public peers. In order to maintain a peering relationship,
especially at the scales that Amazon must see with it's cloud services,
providers really need to maintain an equitable inbound/outbound ratio,
otherwise agreements become void and they actually start charging each other.

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diegomsana
Indeed, Amazon bandwidth prices are quite right compared to most of their
competitors.

And by the way, Softlayer has permanently free inbound traffic for all their
servers, including cloudlayer ones.

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chrischen
Free inbound transfer! Wow just as I was about to start using AWS. Thank you
Jebus.

