5 ms·
Common misconception. The prices are highly negotiable. Nobody with significant traffic is paying anything close to book rates.
by tacos 11y ago
Common misconception. The prices are highly negotiable. Nobody with significant traffic is paying anything close to book rates.
- soccerdave 11y agoWhat do you consider significant? If you are doing over 10TB then you'll be paying lower and even lower the higher you go. This doesn't help the smaller players doing under 10TB. Do you know of people under 10TB that have negotiated better rates?
- tacos 11y agoI don't consider $900/month in bandwidth significant. And I'm sure Amazon account managers don't either -- but it can't hurt to ask, especially if you've got a growth plan that makes sense.
- amazon_not 11y ago10TB is about $50 worth of high quality bandwidth. I'm glad you don't mind paying an extra $10k a year for that.
- soccerdave 11y agoRight now I use 3 Softlayer virtual servers to serve up 15TB of static files a month. It costs me a whopping $168 a month. The same 15TB on AWS would cost $1325 a month. I consider saving $1157 'significant'. Softlayer no longer includes 5TB on every virtual server and their bandwidth is equally outrageous so I'm still evaluating a plan for new servers.
- geofft 11y agoAt that point you're rapidly approaching the scale where cloud-style on-demand provisioning isn't really helping you (unless you prefer AWS's tooling to any "private cloud", which is legit), and you might as well put a bunch of dedicated servers in colo, right? That is to say, the reason you can negotiate a discount once you get well past that point (or if you intend to grow well past that point) is because staying on AWS makes increasingly less sense for you.
- al2o3cr 11y agoDepends on the situation - a bunch of dedicated servers means a sizable shift from "operating expenses" like AWS fees to "capital expenses" for hardware. It also means shifting expenses from monthly as-you-go to mostly upfront.
- Ded7xSEoPKYNsDd 11y agoFinding a provider that leases dedicated servers to you for a monthly fee isn't exactly hard.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago> a bunch of dedicated servers means a sizable shift from "operating expenses" like AWS fees to "capital expenses" for hardware. Not anymore. In the US, you can now write off $500K/year in equipment costs immediately. > It also means shifting expenses from monthly as-you-go to mostly upfront. Dedicated server provider or lease the equipment instead of buy.
- wstrange 11y agoNetwork egress costs on AWS appear to be a factor of 10x more than dedicated servers. Google GCE is pretty much the same. That is a lot of negotiation that needs to be done. Will they get anywhere close to that kind of discount? How big a customer do you need to be?
- iofj 11y agoKeep in mind that if you're sufficiently large, you can negotiate better rates on dedi as well. Because of the massive competition in that market, you don't have to be that large to do it either.
- Scoundreller 11y agoReading between the lines, I think AWS has a huge upstream bandwidth bottleneck that it can't get around easily, while spread out small dedi providers have everything but this problem. (Speculation based on how AWS prices things: Build big, charge for everything, charge what it actually costs with a small markup, and put every high-margin provider out of business)
- kijin 11y agoTransparent pricing is one of the greatest selling points of the "cloud". Nobody in the startup scene wants to deal with traditional enterprisey "call us for a quote" pricing unless they really have no other choice. So if what you're saying is right, that would be just another reason for most small companies to avoid Amazon. If you're wrong, other comments in this thread have also given a good reason for small companies to avoid Amazon.
- tacos 11y agoHuh? It's totally transparent AND you can get a better deal if you pick up the phone and negotiate. They'll ask you to sign a commitment and (unenforceable) exclusivity clause. Some people even take that "confidential" offer letter for volume pricing and shop it around to other cloud providers. Shocker!
- awsnegotiate 11y agoI have trouble believing that this is actually true. I say this as a customer who spends a half million a month with AWS (and that spending is rapidly increasing). There are some growth incentives (eg, prepay $3MM for next year, get 6% off all services), and there are some tiered savings (e.g. 5% off on more than $500k of RIs in a single region), but I've never seen a plausible, verifiable incident of people successfully negotiating AWS rates downward. Do you have any evidence of this at all?
- tacos 11y ago"You agree that the existence and terms of this Addendum and the Private Pricing Program are not publicly known and constitute AWS Confidential Information under the Agreement." Maybe they're milking your investors. Maybe you've built some absurd contraption that they know you won't be able to move elsewhere. Or maybe you need to hire a better negotiator.
- awsnegotiate 11y agoThat text matches what we got from a growth commitment that included a pretty modest discount. Given that we couldn't get it; and that nobody from our company's entire VC network could get it; and that nobody on my CTO email list could get it... I'm going to continue thinking that the anonymous HN commenter is talking out of his ass. But if you can prove me wrong, I'd be thrilled to be wrong.
- nikolay 11y agoTrue. We pay 10% more due to the support plan. ;)