
AWS drops bandwidth pricing - werner
http://aws.amazon.com/pricing_effective_july_2011/
======
rkalla
Making _all_ in-bound traffic free is a super-aggressive (and much
appreciated) move.

As blhack pointed out Voxel's per-GB rate[1] before AWS dropped was extremely
competitive, but they charge for in and out-bound data. AWS, after the 1st of
July will only charge $0.12 for out-bound data and $0.00 for inbound data,
effectively making it something like $0.06/GB compared to Voxel (I'm hand-
waving this a bit to make a point).

Also as wiradikusuma pointed out, this comes right on the heals of Google's
App Engine pricing structure change[2] to be more business-friendly (read:
more expensive/more predictable billing) that upset smaller shops and
individuals.

As someone who reads most of the AWS forums every night, I would say overall
that Amazon seems to be responding more quickly to low level failures that
used to run rampant on the system (although US-EAST still has more failures
than any other region. I guess due to overload). They seem like they are
hitting faster/smoother, sounds like a good time to push forward and grow
which I imagine this move will help do.

Getting a little excited to see what the price decrease for per-GB billing on
S3 will be in the coming months following this up (my assumption).

[1] <http://www.voxel.net/pricing>

[2] [http://www.korokithakis.net/posts/app-engine-pricing-
changes...](http://www.korokithakis.net/posts/app-engine-pricing-changes-
revisited/)

~~~
latch
for 99% of websites...$0.12/gb OUT and 0.0/gb IN will _not_ effectively make
this $0.06/gb.

~~~
arockwell
Can you elaborate on this? Not disputing your point, but it would be nice if
someone could jump in with some real world numbers or a rule of thumb.

~~~
msg
It's because of the ratio of reads to writes. For many applications,
especially in social/content, the creation traffic is an order of magnitude or
two less than the consumption traffic. So free inbound bandwidth is a bit of a
rounding error.

Here's a somewhat old article that captures the rule.

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/jul/20/guardianwee...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/jul/20/guardianweeklytechnologysection2?mobile-
redirect=false)

------
timf
The pricing change is better understood with the tables here which include a
"previous" column:

[http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/06/aws-lowers-its-pricing-
ag...](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/06/aws-lowers-its-pricing-again-free-
inbound-data-transfer-and-lower-outbound-data-transfer-for-all-ser.html)

------
sriramk
This is probably a move in response to Windows Azure dropping its inbound data
transfer rates to zero last week. When I was back in Windows Azure, we would
often see AWS try to do a price-match whenever we changed prices drastically.

~~~
tybris
I know Amazon pays very little attention to competitors. However, their
customers might have asked them to lower prices in response to Azure.

~~~
sriramk
I doubt they process customer feedback in the matter of a few days :).
Besides, there's a history of AMZN doing things just before or just after a
Windows Azure announcement. See their announcements always timed the week
before MIX or PDC or the response to various other pricing changes, etc.

Trust me, Amazon keeps a very close watch on the competition. :)

------
zmmmmm
I'm blown away. This radically changes the cost for one of my core products
(automated browsing from EC2 machines). I've thought for a long time that EC2
was getting comparatively very expensive for bandwidth (simply not decreasing
their prices). I thought they would have to change it, but I didn't expect
free!

~~~
zaidf
I wouldn't be surprised if they put a fair use clause somewhere. Otherwise you
could hypothetically run a fairly resource intensive bot that scrapes data
24x7 using up aws download bw for no cost.

~~~
speckledjim
Instances are already IO bound/capped.

For example, if you start up a micro instance, you'll only be able to download
at like 200kbps or something.

So I'd assume the connection speed is linked to the size of the instance, and
the bandwidth cost is integrated into that cost somewhat.

~~~
meow
I don't think this is accurate. I have seen download speeds of around 6/8MBps
on windows micro instances. The lowest I got was around 3MBps. But I only
tried with downloads of around 30MB files at the maximum.

~~~
eik3_de
This

    
    
      wget -O /dev/null http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
    

gives me about 30 MBytes/s from a micro instance in EU-West

~~~
speckledjim
Sorry yeah it looks like my test was disk IO bound rather than network bound.

------
werner
My blogpost w background information: <http://wv.ly/iLDaqu>

~~~
aw3c2
Direct link:
[http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2011/06/aws_bandwith_pri...](http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2011/06/aws_bandwith_price_drop_july11.html)

------
nigelsampson
I wonder if this was in reaction to the same pricing change from MS Azure
[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2011/06/22/anno...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2011/06/22/announcing-
free-ingress-for-all-windows-azure-customers-starting-july-1st-2011.aspx)

------
Rickasaurus
Amazon is now the #1 choice for web scrapers everywhere :)

~~~
baltcode
I thought most AWS IP addresses were blocked by most admins. Does any one have
experience scraping using Amazon.

~~~
abronte
We have a pretty big e-commerce scraping project, and we don't really run into
many problems regarding blacklisted ip's. There are a few sites who we get
consistent bans from, but with elastic ip's it's pretty much a non-issue. I
have yet to see a site that ban's all amazon ip's.

~~~
sjwright
I run <http://whirlpool.net.au> and I religiously check the Amazon EC2 forum
announcements[1] for new IP ranges to ban.

[1] <https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=1030>

~~~
maaku
Why?

Name me one good reason. Name me one.

~~~
sjwright
Shitloads of rogue bots doing "social media monitoring".

Shitloads of rogue bots stealing content for black-hat SEO.

Shitloads of rogue bots harvesting email addresses.

Shitloads of rogue bots submitting spammy replies.

~~~
maaku
So maintain a blacklist of elastic IPs. If it's too big for you, make it a
community effort.

Those are bad reasons to close your site to _all_ of AWS.

As nupark2 mentioned, there are legitimate users routing traffic through EC2,
even some bots that you'd want to visit your site. Archive.org comes to mind
(many of there scrapers are or were behind AWS). Closing your site or app to a
large swath of the web is the wrong solution. It's like killing a spider with
a bazooka.

~~~
sjwright
Unlike the assumptions you're limited to making, I _know_ how much of my AWS
traffic is human, and it's really very very _very_ small. The sad reality is
I'm sick and tired of rogue bots, and the tiny sliver of collateral damage can
fill out the CAPTCHA validation every so often.

(I also blacklist GWS, rackspace, linode, softlayer, reliablehosting, ovh.net,
node4, netdirect, layer42, all TOR exits... it's actually a pretty huge list.)

------
blhack
For another comparison, voxel.net (which serves imgur):

<http://www.voxel.net/pricing>

$0.10/GB up to 40TB

$0.07/GB up to 500TB

$0.05/GB >500TB

This looks like the cheapest "real" CDN I've seen. Awesome :) Not that I need
it [yet], but here's to hoping :)

~~~
saurik
I use CDNetworks, and at a 50TB commit I'm getting /much/ better pricing than
that... I've even been quoted better pricing than that by Akamai (which people
in this industry view as notoriously expensive). I might encourage you to drop
the quotes around "real" and look at actually real CDNs (the kind you have to
call and negotiate pricing with): they aren't as expensive as you apparently
think they are.

~~~
blhack
Are you seriously suggesting that imgur, which is currently doing almost
1PB/month, isn't using a "real" CDN?

Quotes are there because I've heard of people buying up "unlimited bandwidth"
shared hosting packages, and using them as a cheap "CDN".

~~~
alnayyir
No, just that MrGrim is getting ripped off because he doesn't know the
industry.

~~~
blhack
grim isn't paying that much for voxel. Voxel cut him a ridiculous deal in
exchange for the advertising they get out of it.

We're talking about them right now. The only reason I mentioned them is
because I heard about them in relation to imgur.

------
orijing
Dropbox must be super happy that half their bandwidth costs have disappeared!

~~~
icebraining
Also, backup solutions based on S3. Most of their traffic is inbound.

~~~
cperciva
About 90% of Tarsnap's bandwidth is inbound... but most of Tarsnap's AWS costs
are for storage, not bandwidth. Backup services tend to store a lot of _cold_
data.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
As a Tarsnap customer, would this allow you to stop charging on sending data
to Tarsnap, or does that still cost you somewhere in the lineup?

~~~
cperciva
Tarsnap's upload costs cover the actual bandwith costs, the per-operation cost
of S3 PUTs, the SimpleDB operations for checking account balances, some data
storage (when you delete data, you stop paying for it; but I pay until the
garbage collection job reaps those blocks)... there are lots of costs. The
bandwidth was a significant part of it, though.

I need to crunch some numbers and see how the economics work out before I can
commit to anything, but I'm certainly looking at adjusting the pricing.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
I assumed there was more to it than just bandwidth costs, just wanted to get
an official answer. Thanks.

------
chaselee
Now if only Google App Engine would follow suit...oh wait they raised prices
=/

------
tzs
This is big. It makes it a lot cheaper for a busy site to keep an up to date
mirror at Amazon on standby for use in emergencies.

------
wiradikusuma
this should put some pressure on recent Google App Engine price increase
(fingers crossed)

------
MrAlmostWrong
Everytime I see a price drop my first though is always, "I wonder how much
this increases Dropbox's revenue?"

------
latch
I don't even remember what the old pricing was. For the first (non-free tier),
was it at 0.18? 0.12/gb is getting pretty cheap for non-bulk bandwidth of this
quality.

edit

above poster has link showing it was 0.15

------
MaxGabriel
For someone inexperienced in this market, why wouldn't they just say free?
I've never heard someone sell something for "$0.00"

~~~
dmix
Free is better for singular marketing messages. But for tabular data, when
you're comparing different points, keeping the unit consistent is better.

------
kmfrk
The timing for this Django deployment script couldn't have been better:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2700120>.

I was going to look into deployment scripts for App Engine, but Amazon makes
it more compelling to use AWS.

------
neworbit
Good lord, about time. Why was incoming bandwidth ever on the list?

~~~
mestudent
Because incoming still takes up bandwidth so it makes sense to count it is
such. I however do remember it being free at some point in time.

~~~
zepolen
It's in their best interest to get as much in as possible considering they
charge for storage and deletion.

------
aolnerd
We're looking for even cheaper bandwidth for streaming audio. Can anyone
recommend a vendor to provide 150mbit+ bandwidth on a vps platform or rented
server platform?

------
Joakal
Why is bandwidth pricing higher in Asia despite bandwidth rates there being
among the highest in the world?

~~~
latch
In HK, I pay around $22/m (USD) for 100mbps. I can download from steam or
apple at 5-6+ MB/s. I can download torrents at 10MB/sec. However, when I
download overseas (which is most of the time), I might get 200KB/sec (unless
it's from a serious player in CA).

The point? The high speed you hear about in Asia is a half truth. When you
consider that some of the Internet doesn't exist here (Netflix, ...), high
latency (for gaming) and geo-locked content (Kindle, ...), it's even less than
a half truth.

Anyways, where NA has poor last-mile infrastructure, Asia has poor
intercontinental infrastructure. It's currently a scarce resource, thus prices
are high.

~~~
shinratdr
Have you tried something that doesn't have the overhead of torrents and can
make many concurrent connections like a local HK usenet server?

~~~
latch
I've gone up to 10MB/sec...which is close enough to the theoretical limit of
100Mb/sec. Locally the product works as advertised. But only locally.

~~~
shinratdr
> But only locally.

Fair enough. I use Usenet almost exclusively at this point so I would love
that.

It's true though, I had this illusion of people with that kind of connection
being able to connect to anyone on a quality server instantly.

------
nhoss2
ooh "AWS drops bandwidth pricing" come on please be true! darn it just
inbound.

~~~
timf
It's not just inbound, see the "previous" column here:
[http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/06/aws-lowers-its-pricing-
ag...](http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/06/aws-lowers-its-pricing-again-free-
inbound-data-transfer-and-lower-outbound-data-transfer-for-all-ser.html)

~~~
nhoss2
oh ok, I thought "drops" meant get rid of but reducing is also great

~~~
lsc
Unlimited never is. I mean, there /is/ such thing as "don't worry about it as
long as it's within an order of magnitude or so of what I expect" pricing, and
that can often make a lot of sense on the low end or other places where the
cost of the customer worrying about the bandwidth used is greater than the
cost of providing that bandwidth... but this is not true of the 'at scale'
uses of the cloud.

------
anamax
I wonder how soon/if tarsnap will update their pricing.

~~~
cperciva
It might happen. I need to crunch some numbers.

It won't be overnight, though.

