
Ask HN: Why is the bandwidth on the big 3 cloud providers insanely expensive? - rydre
0.08 per gb is... insane? Are they out of their mind? Maybe I don&#x27;t get this but whenever I chose a provider, I always look at the bandwidth pricing in addition the the compute costs.<p>Bandwidth on DO, Vultr, Linode etc is priced reasonably at 0.01 per gb, though that can be decreased further now.<p>Such is the case with mongodb atlas (their cloud DBaaS) because they only provide their offering at those providers I can&#x27;t use them.<p>Or am I missing something here?
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iscoelho
Bandwidth pricing at GCP/AWS/Azure is not reflective of the price to provide
the bandwidth.

Cloud pricing is strange because it's not based on reality or cost of
providing the service at all. It's also clearly an anti-competitive market
once you understand that.

Short answer is that the big clouds are trying to make a profit - a large
profit - and competing with each other cuts into that profit & devalues the
market. If the market isn't lucrative enough, the big clouds will have less
priority to push their clouds and everyone loses.

There is no other property here.

Reliability/redundancy is not a factor. (Routers & switches don't cost much
anymore)

Performance is not a factor. (Do people really think they don't get their
bandwidth almost free through peering?)

It's all profit.

~~~
randyrand
So you think if Azure or someone offered the best prices compared to the
competition they would be swamped in losses due to the increased demand?

Or that they’ve all decided to keep prices up to have similar demand and
profit?

Neither of those make very much sense to me unless there is active collusion.

~~~
blueblisters
Azure and AWS both have their respective moats. Their locked-in customers
would be up in arms if they decide to offer substantially lower rates to new
customers.

However, I am not sure what's holding Google back. They have all the right
incentives to launch a price war but I guess they are focusing more on "value-
addition" with ML cores, AI APIs etc.

~~~
Can_Not
Google cloud has significantly cheaper prices and a more generous free tier
than AWS, so they kind of already are.

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codegeek
They don't necessarily care about the little guys. They make plenty from the
big fishes so they don't need to care. That is why services like DO exist who
can server little guys like us. Just my 2 cents.

If price is too high, you are not the intended audience. That is how the
market generally works regardless of what we think about the value of the
price.

~~~
cinquemb
I think these represent long term issues for the big guys though. I work at a
small startup in SE asia, and we do about ~250GB/weekday in mostly PDF traffic
which would cost us about $0.12/GB if we just used amazon, but only costs us
closer to ~$0.0331/GB because I put another cdn in front of cloudfront (will
get closer to ~$0.01/GB if we approached 1TB/weekday in bandwidth).

Hopefully we'll ditch cloudfront and s3 as something like backblaze b2 becomes
available in our region.

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fullito
I would not compare something like DO with Google/AWS/Azure.

Google has a globally spanning Network under its own control. They have
peering with all bigger ISPs / Networkowner.

DO doesn't has that. They have barely a few locations and not all locations
support all services.

When Google tell you they have 1-3ms latenc between Zones, thats what they
have. On DO you probably don't even check that.

If you need to operate globally, you will probably not go to DO. You wanna
provide a good service with low latency globally, you go to GAA.

What Google also does, it terminates your TLS connection as close as possible,
for low latency for that expensive roundtrip and encrypts it internally.

When i'm looking for my private stuff, i'm not going to GAA, i go to DO or
Hetzner. They are cheap, relativly reliable and thats it.

When i'm doing something at work, i will not go to DO or Hetzner if it costs
me overhead. That stuff needs to run, 24/7, without me or my colleges
interacting with it. That would cost much more. It is also an operational
risk.

The scale also changes: If a Service costs me 500$ more per month on AWS but
it allows me to have a few new bigger customers (b2b) onboarded, no one will
look at those 500$. An external developer costs between 600-1000$ per day.

I still can't tell you how reasonable those Bandwithprices are, but i do know,
that when i would need low latency or high bandwith also at peak time, i would
go to GAA and i assume that that is part of the cost you pay for it.

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sixothree
I don't want to startle you or anything, but have you seen at the price of
iops compared to what you get from a laptop? Ouch.

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devxpy
Whats even more insane is how bad their documentation is.

Especially with AWS I feel like I get ripped off everytime I use any of their
services, because there's always some magic, undocumented buttons I need to
press in their godforsaken gui to make it work.

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ShakataGaNai
The pricing is insane, yes and no. They are most definitely not out of their
minds.

Networking at scale is complicated and expensive. Of course, at the economies
of scale providers like AWS and GCP it does become much cheaper. No one in
datacenters pays per gigabyte, but you do in the cloud because you're paying
for so much more than just data-go-out.

There is a lot of hardware and glass that goes into you being able to reliably
transfer a gigabyte of data in or out of AWS. They peer with hundreds of
providers and need to constantly monitor and balance traffic in hundreds of
locations. When you buy your own transit, you pay for say 1 gigabit per second
with Level 3. What if Level 3 has an issue? Or that fiber is cut? Well now you
need to pay for 1gbps with GTT. What if the path to your customers isn't
optimal via GTT? Well now you need to pay for 1gbps with Verizon.

Huge transit speeds, combined with huge IP spaces and huge routing tables
means hugely expensive routers anywhere they are doing significant amounts of
peering (which is hundreds of locations). You as the customer don't care, you
just expect your gigabyte to go where you want it, no matter what.

Does all this really cost AWS $0.02/GB? Hell no. They want you in their
ecosystem. If it's cheap and easy for you to send your data out (as it is
practically free to get your data in), then you'd just leave anytime you
wanted.

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Someone
I think part of it is that the big players don’t want you to move data or some
of your processes out of their cloud.

Moving data to clouds or within clouds typically is cheaper than moving data
out of it. For example, moving data _into_ EC2 is free (or used to be, or
[https://www.cloudmanagementinsider.com/data-transfer-
costs-e...](https://www.cloudmanagementinsider.com/data-transfer-costs-
everything-you-need-to-know/) is incorrect. I tried checking that on
AWS.amazon.com, but got lost. I also tried finding within-AWS transfer costs,
but again, got lost)

It basically is a trap: once you have a lot of stuff in a cloud, all processes
working with the data better be in the same cloud.

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verdverm
Well, you are getting more than just raw bandwidth, there are other
considerations with topology, performance, and security.

Google has two network tiers now, so there is a lower priced option. Note(1)
most go down with volume, but do not get that close to $0.01/Gb. Note(2) intra
data center / cloud networking has different prices.

Is the issue your application is running in a different cloud than the
database? If so, you will want to move your application to the same cloud
simply for latency reasons.

~~~
rydre
Yeah but my application is consumer focused and bandwidth is a real cost.

~~~
verdverm
Ok, but are you intending to run the app & DB in the same cloud provider and
region?

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steffan
As another commenter has pointed out, if your application server is in the
same region as your MongoDB Atlas deployment, you're not paying for transfer
to your application tier.

You'd only have to worry about outbound data transfer from your app servers to
the internet.

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iptrans
Wholesale Internet bandwidth can be had for $0.05 per Mbps per month.

You can transfer about 320 GB in a month.

In other words, what you pay for a GB from the cloud costs about what you'd
pay for a Mbps in a well connected datacenter.

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throwaway888abc
0.08 per gb is... insane? It is!

As long there is a buyer, there is also seller. They are some serious money
pumped into marketing last few years to establish this model as 'cloud'
standard.

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gpapilion
Network is now generally not oversubscribed in aws and gcp. This adds much
higher costs since you’re talking about 40g+ network adapter and CLOS fabrics
(google juipter style). That doesn’t even account for the development of the
sdn layer.

So yes it’s expensive, but you’re unlikely to exhaust its capacity or either
are any of your neighbors. That’s what you’re paying for.

