Comment by GordonS
4 years ago
It really is price gouging - bandwidth is actually cheap.
A couple of comparisons:
Oracle Cloud give you 10TB of bandwidth for free, with overage charged at around €7.5/TB.
You can rent a VPS from the likes of Hetzner, and they will throw in 2-20TB of bandwidth for free, with overage charged at something like €1/TB - AWS charge an eye-watering €125 for each TB!
I think the reason the big 3 (AWS, Azure, GCP) still charge such huge amounts is that they profit so greatly from it, and there is more than enough business to go round.
You know you're greedy when Oracle is cheaper
> I think the reason the big 3 (AWS, Azure, GCP) still charge such huge amounts is that they profit so greatly from it, and there is more than enough business to go round
Or that their networking does vastly more and is of better quality? Hetzner can't provide you with everything around a VPC that AWS do. Just a tiny example - peering VPCs across regions, which is free.
I would say that it's two simple factors:
1. High bandwidth charges are an effective form of lock-in. Once your data is there, it's prohibitive to move it out again.
2. Bandwidth use is very poorly understood in many businesses, compared with simpler metrics like storage, memory, and CPU. AWS can run razor-thin margins on things that people easily compare to on-prem or VPS-style offerings, and then make the money back in areas like network traffic, fine-grained monitoring, and other items that as less obvious.
I totally agree, but was stunned to see DigitalOcean charging $0.10/GB for outbound transfer for their new (quite cool imo) apps service. You do get 40GB-100GB included, but it means it's unusable for bandwidth heavy apps. They include 1TB (which is pooled across all VMs) and 0.01/GB on their standard platform.
Yeah, I think Digital Ocean are really taking the piss there - proven by their existing $0.01/GB pricing, as you mentioned.
I reckon DO have seen the big providers getting away with it, and they want a piece. Why wouldn't they, when there is apparently so little pushback?
I suppose you have object storage which is still $0.01/GB (plus includes 1TB to start with), so for most apps your bandwidth will come out of that for most files, so your 0.1/GB price is only for html/api/etc transfer. But still, it's annoying and seems completely arbitatary.