
AWS Data Transfer Price Reduction - sah88
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-data-transfer-price-reduction/?sc_ichannel=EM&sc_icountry=global&sc_icampaigntype=launch&sc_icampaign=EM_128506540&sc_idetail=em_1778261631&ref_=pe_411040_128506540_12
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djcapelis
It's great to see Amazon continue to push down bandwidth charges when they
manage to get prices down. Bandwidth pricing can be incredibly expensive in
some parts of the world. With AWS you basically get to take advantage of
Amazon's negotiating team and clout while still being able to put nodes near
the end-points.

(Basically bandwidth in Australia is ridiculously expensive and if you wanted
to serve that continent it'd be a big headache, but now you can just spin up a
machine on EC2 in that region and use Amazon's prices.)

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wbond
AWS and most other cloud providers have prohibitively expensive bandwidth
compared to Linode's bundled bandwidth. With Linode you get a free server to
boot!

Just yesterday I compared a VM with 8gb ram moving 4.4TB of data. With Linode
you get 8TB for $80 a month. Yesterday AWS was $630 for the same server and
the 4.4TB of bandwidth. For that price on Linode you can get 4 16gb servers,
totaling 32 cores and 64TB of bandwidth. Even with the just announced AWS
price reduction, it is still extremely expensive.

If you move a lot of bandwidth, check out Linode.

~~~
freshflowers
It irks me that every time AWS comes up people compare the pricing with simple
VPS providers that only sell virtual machines and a few bells and whistles.

For starters, users that burn a lot of bandwidth probably don't do it by
serving files from a VPS in a single location. In an AWS context, they may be
using S3, Cloudfront and all the features and services that come with it.
Setting all of that up on DIY VPS boxes (and maintaining it) may be fun for a
hobby, but in business that's all costs. The cost of bandwidth is a trivial
footnote.

Saying Linode's bandwidth is cheaper is like saying steak is cheaper at the
butcher than it is at a restaurant.

~~~
virtuallynathan
That may be true, but try building a CDN on top of AWS and you'll be out of
cash pretty quickly with their bandwidth prices.

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emidln
It seems like a bad strategic decision to try to build a CDN on top of a
platform that already offers a CDN while expecting to be cheaper than their
economy-of-scale-driven CDN.

Not to say that you couldn't build a CDN on AWS, but if you're going to do it,
wanting to do it for cheaper than someone who doesn't pay markup on the same
instances (Amazon) isn't realistic.

~~~
virtuallynathan
This is true, but not all content is fit for CloudFront or other CDNs.

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ghshephard
The thing I love about pricing from organizations like Amazon, is that there
is _zero_ pressure, incentive, or intent on their part to curb you from using
their resources, or finding you in any way in violation of some implicit "Fair
Use" restrictions.

For example, in Singapore, Bandwidth from EC2 to the Internet is $0.120 per GB
for the first 10 TB. So, if I have a site that sends out 2 TB of data, my
bandwidth charges are $240/month, and Amazon is 100% fine with me doing that
every month, and I should have zero concern about any type of rate limiting,
or restrictions.

On the other hand, Digital Ocean (who I _do_ have a VPS with in Singapore)
charges me $10/month for a VPS with 2 TB/Transfer. I have no idea what they
would do if I actually started using all 2 TB every month, but I can't believe
it would end well.

I'm curious though - has anyone played around with using the cheap bandwidth
of these VPSs to do a "roll your own" CDN? I.E. for $500/month you could
purchase 100 Digital Ocean VPS @$5/month and, in _theory_ get 100 * 1
Terabyte, or 100 Terabytes of transfer to the internet a month.

I'm pretty sure Digital Ocean would frown on that, but I'm interested in
whether anyone has done the obvious thing and tried.

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jokergd
Regarding DigitalOcean -- they would NOT frown on it

if you go over your usage, you are charged 0.02 cents per gigabyte over your
limit

if you stay within your usage, nothing happens

(note, as of right now, there is no charges for overages. until your bandwidth
transfer stats are available on the control panel, there will be no overage
charges)

~~~
ghshephard
My suspicion is they would shut you down, or encourage you to move to a larger
droplet. As is referenced by glomph later in this thread, their TOU states
"3.3 You shall not: (i) take any action that imposes or may impose (as
determined by us in our sole discretion) an unreasonable or disproportionately
large load on our (or our third party providers’) infrastructure;"

Consistently using excessive bandwidth likely falls in the "unreasonable or
disproportionately large load " category. And, regardless, $5 for 1 Terabyte
is only $0.005/gigabyte, which can only be offered, as long _as people don 't
actually use 1 Terabyte of bandwidth_ The cheapest price Amazon offers (after
discounts) is $0.08/gigabyte, _after_ 150 terabytes which you've paid them
$12,800 for.

In comparison, if we were to take Digital Ocean at Face Value, we could get
that same 150 Terabytes for $150 * 5 or $750.

Do you truly believe that Digital Ocean is able to offer bandwidth at such a
Discount to Amazon? Particularly when the price Schedule for Amazon in
Singapore is graduated as follows:

    
    
       First 1 GB / month	$0.000 per GB
       Up to 10 TB / month	$0.120 per GB
       Next 40 TB / month	$0.085 per GB
       Next 100 TB / month	$0.082 per GB
       Next 350 TB / month	$0.080 per GB
    

You get a sense that their is a structural price floor around $0.08/GB that is
hard for them to sell bandwidth for less.

The point I'm trying to make, and hopefully succeeding at, is DO and Amazon
are in different business models. DO is profitable as long as the majority of
their customers don't use the services intensively. Amazon, on the other hand,
is profitable _regardless of how much of their services you use_ \- as a
result, each of the companies incentives regarding account termination, and
rate limiting, will likewise be aligned.

Please note, of course, that I'm saying this as a thoroughly satisfied Digital
Ocean Customer. I've ceased using Amazon EC2 for pretty much everything, and
have DO droplets all around the world. I love their service, and an am
extraordinarily satisfied with both the performance and quality of their
offering.

~~~
jokergd
I work for DigitalOcean.

We would not shut you down.

Only gray situation is if you are flooding; amazon will send you a [bandwidth]
bill, we send you a ticket

~~~
brightsize
I have a DO VM that I use for a few hobby apps but mostly for a Tor relay.
$10/mo plan. I've done my best to throttle the bandwidth usage within the plan
bounds but can't say for sure whether or not I've been entirely successful at
that. Nevertheless -> zero fuss from DO, nothing, not a single complaint or
$.01 added to my bill. I don't think I (or the Tor user community) would have
fared nearly was well with Amazon.

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_stephan
I'm curious how much margin there still is in the bandwidth charges of the big
cloud providers. Hetzner only charges 1.39 € per extra TB (and the first 30 TB
(!) are free), though the bandwidth quality probably isn't comparable.

[http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/news/trafficpreis-
dauerhaft...](http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/news/trafficpreis-dauerhaft-
reduziert)

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davidmat
Strong incentive to dive in to CloudFront CDN it seems. Transfer from AWS to
CloudFront 'edge' caches is now free, and outgoing from CloudFront to the
internet is nearly 30% cheaper all of a sudden.

~~~
donavanm
cloudFront has been cheaper than S3 for as long as I can recall. And it makes
sense with the way amazon does cost based pricing. Its cheaper to transfer
cached bits fromthe edge of the network than pull it from inside of multiple
datacenters.

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mackwic
I really don't understand this thing about charging bandwidth. In France we
are used to the free and unlimited bandwidth for all providers and hosters
(see OVH, Gandi, Dedibox... but also all ISP), and the rare cases when I had
to pay my bandwidth (Hertzner), the service was quite bad (routes issues, ipv6
issues, and the throughput was very inconsistent).

It really seems to me like some providers are trying to charge for anything in
order to extract value.

~~~
ghshephard
TANSTAAFL

