Comment by DontBreakAlex
1 year ago
That's because amazon and big telecom convinced you that bandwidth is expensive. It isn't. Once the equipment is there, you might as well use it.
1 year ago
That's because amazon and big telecom convinced you that bandwidth is expensive. It isn't. Once the equipment is there, you might as well use it.
Well, they have to pay for the amortized equipment cost. Which, yes, is much less than you think. The big 3 clouds have set their prices in an age when services were much more expensive to provide, and they make a big deal out of the fact they've never raised their prices - but they rarely lower them, either. Now they have insane profit margins.
The invisible hand of the free market has come to fix that, *but you have to opt into the hand by shopping around.* If you don't, you don't get its benefits! You have to willingly take the choice to move to cheaper providers instead of overpriced ones.
Hetzner Cloud: $1/TB (20TB free) Digital Ocean: $10/TB (few TB free depending on server size) AWS: $90/TB (0.1TB free, used to be 0.001TB free) Netlify: $550/TB (0.1TB or 1TB free)
If you move up from $5/month VPSes, to real dedicated servers, you are now spending a lot more money and therefore you get more free perks. A huge number of providers exist that will give you unlimited or unlimited† bandwidth depending on how much you spend. Renting a powerful server with unlimited 1Gbps should cost a few hundred to several hundred dollars per month, and a powerful server with unlimited 10Gbps (i.e. 3000TB/month) should cost a few thousand dollars per month. You can even get some with 100Gbps (for tens of thousands).
Also consider asking your local ISPs and datacenters. If you live in a central area, you can probably get a comparable connection to a nearby datacenter if not straight to your office, for a comparable price. Data center connections are their bread and butter and they should be able to give you a quote quite rapidly; to your office will be a more custom thing.
Recently I got a quote for AMS-IX peering in Berlin, i.e. a peering in Amsterdam plus a link from Amsterdam to Berlin, about a 600km distance. That would cost 950 euros per month. If 1Gbps, it would cost 300 euros per month. Even though it's not really got anything to do with internet access (transit), I include this number to give some indication of the "true" cost of "raw" bandwidth.
> Now they have insane profit margins.
"your margin is my opportunity"
Wouldn't there be at least a handful of competitors if the economics worked out that way?
A good number of small hosts offer very cheap bandwidth compared to AWS. With Cloudflare’s economy of scale, their costs should be even lower. You only need a ~100Mbps link to serve 30TB/mo, which would cost them ~$10, maybe less.
They’ve written about it before: https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress
There are tons, the big providers like AWS, GCS, etc are really the only ones who charge ridiculous amounts for bandwidth and everything else.
Those big providers have pretty much normalized high fees and convinced people that's what it costs, the reality is any normal provider like Hetzner for example gives you tons of bandwidth for essentially zero cost included with your servers.
A good data center can sell you a sustained 10Gbps for, and I’m guessing at going rate, but like 4-7k a month? If you’re making a commitment cheaper, and that’s basically a retail pipe for someone in a colocated facility.
For larger providers, bandwidth cost drops tremendously, especially if you’re well connected as transit is much cheaper and if you are really large or a network provider you may even be routing between your own facilities or in some cases from one customer to another and every large scale isp is going to want a “direct link” to your facility (a peering relationship). Those costs are astronomically small at scale for bandwidth.
The ISP or similar then turns around and sells a sustained network throughout as GB transferred, which isn’t how wholesale bandwidth is sold at all. So the get to charge for the data the pipe moves while they only pay for the connection itself — the markup added to this process is considerable.
For someone operated a global CDN, which is basically what they do, they have racks of storage and computer collocated all over the world and optimize the living crap out of their network to reduce their costs and make it run on as many peering relationships as possible. It’s an expensive and complex business to set up, but once it’s set up you get a fairly good and consistent return out of it.
The reason for this article is related to the nature of that business: it’s the issue of liability.
When you have policies where you protect your clients from downsides and excessive use on the network, you suddenly have to assume the role of paying attention to what’s on the network and policing it’s contents. That’s not possible with a massive system like this generally, so they push the liability down to the customer and discount the mistakes that come up. That’s why things are set up like this… this kind of stuff isn’t their business at all really. They are looking for the customers that convert and pay, which is very profitable, and the free tier is often thought of as a sustainable cost if you are large enough scale, as it substitutes for the rather massive expense of marketing and sales which is one of the largest expenses in a bandwidth focused business. CAC is the free tier.
There also competitors, but the benefits of scale are tremendous in terms of cost efficiency. A large provider might be paying just a very small fraction of a penny or less (even “free”) compared to what a small provider is paying. So that’s why you end up with fewer competitors because it truly is a business that benefits from economies of scale.
There are other smarter people on here who can correct any mistakes I’ve made or provide better pricing or whatever, but that’s the more in depth answer.
There are a lot of them:
https://getdeploying.com/reference/data-egress
Have you not... looked? They exist - arguably too many of them. Clouds aren't a good indicator of reasonable pricing.
In EU, yes. EU cloud providers offers bandwidth on the cheap, much cheaper than anywhere else.