14 ms·
Comparing Bandwidth Costs of Amazon, Google and Microsoft Cloud Computing
- cobookman 9y agoI dont think its fair to compare GCP's egress costs to a colo's. A collocation is simply sending your packets straight to the internet, where-as GCP routes your packets over private fiber to its closet POP to your user. Giving you better latency.
- shiftpgdn 9y agoDo you have more details about this? I am 100% certain this isn't the case in Azure.
- cobookman 9y agoIt's not the case with azure or aws. Only true with GCP and GCPs global load balancer / software defined networking.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- amluto 9y agoThe last time I measured AWS latency to anywhere, it tens of milliseconds higher than the super-cheap-and-crappy virtual server service I compared it to.
- fhoffa 9y agoYou can measure it now: - http://www.gcping.com/ http://www.gcping.com/ (From your browser to multiple Google zones)
- slackingoff2017 9y agoThis is only true with Google as far as I know. And I'm fairly sure that all cloud providers only have maybe 10 edge routers in the US so the utility is limited. You can't have too many edge routers because they rely on IP Anycast which is dangerous to do if your routes are too similar.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dna_polymerase 9y agoYou are right, the Google Network magic is awesome. Yet I agree with the opinion here. They charge more than they should. Yet I think in the long run it will become cheaper (AWS is always pushing for price reduction and the others will follow)
- bitmapbrother 9y agoIsn't GCP the one that pushes for price reductions and then the rest will follow?
- QUFB 9y agoThe bandwidth is the soda: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12270129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12270129
- mrkurt 9y agoWhen you buy in mbps, you're actually billed based on 95th percentile usage. So this comparison is way off, depending on traffic patterns, 1mb/s committed can work out to about 120GB in a month on average. If you use reasonable GB per mb/s numbers the cloud providers don't look all that bad.
- shiftpgdn 9y agoI have posted a few times about how absurdly expensive all the cloud providers are. If you have a baseline load you should be co-locating bare metal. Any excess capacity you need should spill over into your AWS/GCE/Azure account. For example: A dedicated m4.16xLarge EC2 instance in AWS is $3987/month. You could build that same server for $15,000 through Dell, lease it at $400/month (OpEx), and colo it with a 1GB/s blended bandwidth connection billed at the 95th percentile for $150/month.
- api 9y agoOVH has absurdly low prices on both. If you have a baseline load take a look. Their enterprise offerings are pretty rock solid and they have multiple data centers with direct fiber backplane interconnects. IMHO the big cloud providers only make sense if you have a highly elastic load or if you are making extensive use of their as-a-service higher level offerings. If you're running baseline load bare metal destroys them.
- TheDrizzle43 9y agoUnfortunately OVH doesn't have any data centers in the US although they seem to be working on them.
- api 9y agoMontreal has low pings to the US.
- eropple 9y agoI used to use OVH on occasion, but I was really disappointed with their North American-based tech support. Didn't seem particularly plugged-in and English proficiency was shaky. (At this point I'm in AWS because I don't really care about low-point performance and would rather spike up when needed.)
- mbesto 9y ago> You could build that same server for $15,000 through Dell, lease it at $400/month (OpEx), and colo it with a 1GB/s blended bandwidth connection billed at the 95th percentile for $150/month. And then magically maintain it for free?
- m-j-fox 9y ago> Google Fiber for Business Maybe worth renting an office in Provo just to get the deal.
- allemagne 9y agoSLC if your employees like the mountains but might want a beer or caffeinated beverage once in a while ;)
- m-j-fox 9y agoI'm not cruel enough to locate actual people in Provo, just servers.
- gnopgnip 9y agoThe LDS Church has a prohibition on hot beverages but cold caffeinated are actually allowed. It is a common misconception that all caffeine is not allowed. Homebrewed beer, and homebrewed wine are technically allowed also. Many also ignore the part in the wow about eating meat sparingly while misinterpreting the rest.
- slackingoff2017 9y agoHow is this is a surprise to anyone? The big players are all pushing their clouds because its a cash bonanza. It's the SaaS model for hardware, make money forever because your customers never own anything. I've done the math many times and it's orders of magnitude cheaper to colocate as long as you can afford an IT guy and the upfront cost of hardware.
- mostly_harmless 9y agoTheres other hidden costs as well. What happens when a harddrive fails in your colo? Unless you have best practice backups, you will lose customer data and trust. GCloud abstracts the issue of hardware so you can focus on real business development. And to some, that's worth the cost until they can properly afford all the hidden costs of independent hosting.
- slackingoff2017 9y agoThese are solved problems though. RAID works great around 99% of the time and for the others you can use off-site backup. It's extremely rare that something needs a true 100% uptime. Salesforce and Reddit still go down for maintenance windows in 2017. For one project I setup log streaming with Postgres to the cloud(since inbound BW is free :) ) and ran a hot backup there just in case. Really though in my experience the cloud is far less reliable than colocation. I've had AWS VMs "degrade" or randomly die countless times but I can't remember the last time my Colo boxes went down, probably not since I last upgraded the OS.
- carterehsmith 9y ago> it's orders of magnitude cheaper to colocate as long as you can afford an IT guy and the upfront cost of hardware. It may be. But for many people, it does not matter. Let's say you work at the place (I do) where "compute" cost is like ~0.5% of the total costs. Almost all of the cost is employee's salaries and benefits. BTW we get (and from what I hear, everyone does) offers from other cloud vendors to switch, and get 1 year free or whatever. And it gets ignored because it is a big risk for a tiny possible gain.
- mmalone 9y agoKeep in mind that with cloud providers you're also paying for the SDN that makes dynamic provisioning of VMs and logical network segmentation possible. Scalable SDN is much harder / more expensive than traditional networking.
- wmf 9y agoYet they charge zero for the SDN and crazy high prices for Internet bandwidth.
- mmalone 9y agoTrue, and it's still probably overpriced... but a lot of the SDN expense is in the stateful routing between networks (e.g., traffic going to/from the internet).
- PedroBatista 9y ago4 to 5 times more expensive?
- mmalone 9y agoI'm not an expert, but it's possible... from what I understand amazon does SDN on CPUs in Dom0, Microsoft uses FPGAs, and Google has burnt their own ASICs... those are all expensive options. Much more expensive than generic networking gear. Possibly 4-5x, but idunno...
- wmf 9y agoAmazon and Google's custom NICs should be no more expensive than standard NICs. Microsoft's FPGA frankenNIC is definitely expensive though. Still, recouping the cost of the NIC by making internal bandwidth free and Internet transfers really expensive is kind of a weird way to do it.
- mmalone 9y agoI believe Amazon uses commodity NICs + iptables in Dom0 (based on rumors). I have no idea what a custom ASIC would cost, but I think the Jupiter networking gear / Titan NIC that Google built are pretty advanced components that would cost more than commodity stuff. In any case, the hardware components are fixed costs. What's not fixed is the cost of applying routing and segmentation rules for each packet. There are scarce resources involved here: the hardware has limited memory and limited cycles. You're paying for the use of those scarce resources (e.g., having a memory resident stateful firewall rule for a TCP session). Charging for bandwidth isn't perfect, but it probably correlates pretty closely with the underlying resources and is a much more intuitive unit-of-value for customers.
- dddchk 9y agoCannot agree more with title. I did a comparative model of AWS bills and colo bills in the context of companies of different sizes (https://blog.paxautoma.com/buy-or-rent-the-cost-model-hosting-the-cloud-and-in-a-colo-2/ https://blog.paxautoma.com/buy-or-rent-the-cost-model-hostin...). It turned out frequently overlooked costs for bandwidth and provisioned IOPS can be responsible of large chunk of the EC2 bill.
- Terretta 9y agoRouter? Gateway? Firewall? Network Access Control? VLANs? Ability to manage all this through declarative version controlled code w/ rollback? The costs of doing those (well) yourself are not cheap. Getting them from a provider that's certified to do them well while giving you software control also isn't cheap. You're comparing cost of gas per gallon to to expense of miles driven per gallon. Pretty sure on your IRS or corporate expense report those aren't the same.
- paulddraper 9y agoExactly. Olive Garden is $10 for a pasta plate. I could have bought the ingredients for less than $2. It takes times and skill to turn the ingredients into something useful. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are IaaS/PaaS, not ISPs.
- adriand 9y agoHeck, even the cost of creating and maintaining documentation for the services has to be enormous. The first time I worked with the AWS IoT services I was extremely impressed by the breadth, depth, and quality of the documentation, and it all seemed up-to-date: the screenshots showed the same interfaces I was seeing, and even documentation on small features or use-cases seemed to be accurate and current. When you put it all together, you're not paying for bandwidth, you're paying for the power and convenience of a robust, high-quality, high-availability solution that provides extraordinary benefits when looked at holistically.
- btym 9y ago
- venning 9y agoSince Lightsail is mentioned, it's probably worth including Digital Ocean since they offer almost identical network transfer for the money [1]. [1] https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/ https://www.digitalocean.com/pricing/
- RKearney 9y agoIt's also worth noting that Digital Ocean gives you half the amount of RAM that Linode[0] and Vultr[1] offer for the same price point. [0] https://www.linode.com/pricing [1] https://www.vultr.com/pricing/
- benwilber0 9y agoWorth noting that Digital Ocean doesn't actually bill for bandwidth. They say they do in their Droplet template descriptions, but they really don't. I've pushed many many terabytes to/from my Droplets and never received a bill for it. But you need to cap your individual Droplet bandwidth using something like tc[0] around ~400MB/s or they'll shut off the network interface (DDoS detection). [0] http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Traffic-Control-HOWTO/intro.html http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Traffic-Control-HOWTO/intro.html
- tribby 9y agoindeed. I'm surprised how buried this comment is, because it's a really good deal (until they change things). anecdotally, DO sent me an email when one of my droplets was sustaining around 200MB/s, but it wasn't a "knock it off" email, it was an "is this intentional" email. is the ~400MB/s figure from your own experience?
- desdiv 9y ago(Bandwidth is ambiguous in this context so I'll use "data transfers" instead) I personally don't see the outrage. AmaGoogSoft overcharges for data transfers because they know they can get away with it and that lowering it won't attract more customers. Customers with transfer-heavy applications will always buy their servers from providers with unlimited transfers like OVH[0][1], where you can do hundreds of terabytes a month with no extra charges (1.5 Gbps * 3600 * 24 * 30 = 486 TB). Even if AmaGoogSoft lowered their transfer prices by 100 fold their pricing still can't compete with OVH. Companies with enough engineering resources can always go with the best of both worlds: transfer-heavy servers on OVH, and "regular" servers on AmaGoogSoft. The expensive data transfers will only hit smaller outfits, but these customers won't switch because it's not worth the hassle to split your hosting across two providers. [0] https://www.ovh.com/us/private-cloud/options/bandwidth.xml https://www.ovh.com/us/private-cloud/options/bandwidth.xml [1] https://www.ovh.co.uk/web-hosting/unlimited_traffic https://www.ovh.co.uk/web-hosting/unlimited_traffic
- FTA 9y ago> I personally don't see the outrage. AmaGoogSoft overcharges for data transfers because they know they can get away with it and that lowering it won't attract more customers. I know a handful of scientists, myself included, who would consider cloud computing were it not for the expensive egress costs. The ease of spinning up lots of computing power for scientific modelling is useless if retrieving the vast quantities of raw output data is costly. I will have to investigate OVH though as a potential opportunity--thanks.
- openasocket 9y agoHow much raw output data are we talking about? What order of magnitude? Unless we're talking PB a month EC2 prices seem fairly reasonable. Also keep in mind intra-region communication between instances is free
- sjg007 9y agoIf you're an academic you could probably negotiate with google/msft/aws for a discounted if not free egress rate.
- mankash666 9y ago"Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure and Google Gloud Platform are all seriously screwing their customers over when it comes to bandwidth charges." Disagree. There's no false advertising here, they're making you pay for their service and convenience of using a combined [Paas, Iaas, Saas ..etc]. It's unfair to view these services as a singular function, you typically touch MANY features/products in production. The cost includes the convenience of offering everything under one roof, because, face it, doing everything by yourself at the SLAs provided by the giants is no trivial task. Unless you're a BIG company that likes to distract itself with infrastructure instead of building and sharpening the core offerings, chances are that you will NEVER really build anything as reliable, inter-operable, configurable and manageable at cost.
- MichaelGG 9y agoThis is simply untrue for bandwidth charges if you're pushing a lot of data. A streaming video service, for example, might end up paying $0.10/user/hour. So a movie-a-night customer would cost $6. What multiple of reasonable do you think that is?
- mankash666 9y agoA good case study is Dropbox. They didn't build any of their own infrastructure until they became big enough (2 years ago).
- Dobbs 9y agoDropbox built their own infrastructure over five years ago. They just took several years to turn the infra from idle to being used.
- Mahh 9y agoThe fact here isn't quite right. (I'm an employee at Dropbox) Primarily, until 2 years ago we did lean on S3 for all block storage, but most of the rest of the infrastructure (metadata storage, etc) ran in our own datacenters. Your point I think you're getting at sounds like something I'd agree with though -- you can wait a bit the cost efficiency starts to be what is important/impactful to work on before shifting your usage away from some of these providers.
- nodesocket 9y agoWhile public bandwidth is indeed significantly more expensive on clouds, not all traffic needs to be public and different clouds charge different amounts. I wrote a blog post on Google Cloud latency and pricing across zones and regions which may be useful for others: https://blog.elasticbyte.net/comparing-bandwidth-prices-and-network-latency-between-google-compute-zones-and-regions/ https://blog.elasticbyte.net/comparing-bandwidth-prices-and-...
- geetfun 9y agoIt's suffice to say that the cloud providers have a different set of customers in mind. I have servers on both OVH/Linode variety of service providers as well as one single app running on AWS. For the products I run on OVH/Linode, I sell the service at less than $20/month. The one on AWS sells for $200+ per month. Again, it's because of the requirements/SLAs. Based on experience, AWS is a lot more robust for what I'm using it for.
- llukas 9y agoPitchfork mode on: Outgoing bandwidth should be even more expensive! Then maybe, just maybe my mobile data cap wouldn't be drained that quickly by bloated webpages and stuff. ;)
- FLUX-YOU 9y agoNew fun: Take credit card churning and apply it to cloud data. Build tools to seamlessly move apps between cloud providers.
- elevensies 9y agoBack of the envelope calculation: - assume $100/TB for cloud data transfer - assume one employee full time equivalent to manage colo'd servers ($10,000/mo), plus $30/TB data transfer The break even point for the colo'd setup from a networking perspective is: 10,000 + 30X = 100X X = 10,000/70 = 142 (TB/month) At 1MB per "request" I believe this works out to about 50 requests per second average to reach this traffic level. Weaknesses of this model: - Data transfer only. Depending on what else you're doing you could also save a lot on compute and storage. - I don't know that much about how colocated data transfer would be priced ... i.e. do you need overprovision to guarantee availability, etc. - one employee to handle servers to replicate the Amazon AWS experience ... could be highly variable depending on what AWS features you are using.
- lumost 9y agoThis calculation is an all or nothing affair though. The reality is that you can avoid most AWS bandwidth charges by direct connecting to an internet exchange. It's still only worth the effort if you're looking at a 6 figure bandwidth bill, but it doesn't require new employees.
- elevensies 9y agoI guess what I'd like to know is: at what point is it worth seriously evaluating alternatives to just using cloud services and paying the sticker price -- which means evaluating the labor cost as well as the cost of the service, where this submission and many others I've seen will quantify the cost of the services and say that bare metal is so much cheaper while ignoring the cost of managing it.
- lumost 9y agoThe general break even point is circa 200k USD per month, assuming the company has spare capital, and the ability to commit to using the same gear for 3 years. It's useful to keep in mind that in this type of scenario the goal is not to replace a cloud provider but to leverage capital to get better bang for the buck on select services. ex. using in-house compute farms and leveraging s3 for storage
- thebestman 9y agoThis analysis is way too oversimplified. It completely ignores the shape of the traffic (real apps have peaks and valleys of usage - they don't pump exactly 100 Mbps every second of every day). Cloud providers charge the same amount regardless of how bursty your app is, and they have to provision capacity so that all customers get good performance even under unusual spikes (the more spiky your traffic, the better a deal per-MB pricing is for you). And of course it ignores all the ancillary networking HW and SW that supports these services, and all the labor you save by not having to manage that stuff yourself. I've analyzed the cost of cloud services to death (I've worked for a couple of them) and the only way they aren't great deals is if you don't need high quality operations (i.e. if you can deal with slow-downs or occasional outages then you can do better elsewhere). Otherwise, if you're small-scale then these marginal cost differences don't matter, and if you're larger scale then call up these cloud providers and get yourself a discount off the list price.
- Dylan16807 9y agoIf colocation actually cost that much, it would make sense for a connection that allows extreme bursting to charge 3x as much per byte. The real number to compare to is the google data for business rate. You can do lots of colocation in that price range. And that is why the cloud prices are unreasonable.
- sdenton4 9y agoHouses are such a rip-off! Just look how much more expensive they are than a pile of wood!
- cagenut 9y agoThis is a super irritating feature of "enterprise" vendor pricing. What almost everyone on these platforms is doing is moving most of their bandwidth out of one of the CDN services (like say cloudfront) and then negotiating custom pricing on that bandwidth that is often as much as a full decimal place cheaper as long as you sign a couple grand a month yearly commit. There's still this massive massive pricing cusp between using the cloud as a utility and jumping into the suits & drinks & lunches sales guy game.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bitmapbrother 9y agoDid he factor in latency? if you want to ride in first class you have to pay more.
- Lazare 9y agoMeh. The big cloud platforms offer a rich selection of different offerings, which (just like in every other industry) cross subsidize each other. When I go to a restaurant, I don't expect that they will be making the same profit margin on every item on the final bill, and in fact, they almost never do. Drinks tend to have a very high profit margin, some labour intensive items may be a break even at best, and the complimentary bread sticks or chips and salsa (if offered) will certainly be a loss. I guess I could write a very upset article about how my local mexican restaurant is SERIOUSLY SCREWING ME OVER with their drink prices, but if I don't write the companion piece about their cheap burritos (subsidized, of course, by the drink prices), it would only show half the picture. The reality is that I'm buying a whole package (at AWS or a restaurant) and I should evaluate the whole picture. Yes, I can get bandwidth cheaper outside AWS (or a can of coke a lot cheaper from a big box retailer). But I can't really get the total package of integrated, managed services outside AWS (certainly not for the cost they charge), any more than I can get someone else to show up in my kitchen and cook a three piece meal and then do all the dishes. (Which is to say, I totally could hire a chef to do that, but it would cost me a lot more. I could BUILD an internal SQS clone if I had to, but my employer would never break even on the cost of getting me to do so.) AWS is very cheap for some things and very expensive for others. Depending on your usage and workload it may or may not be economical to buy the package they offer. If it is, go for it. If not, don't. Just like, you know, every other good or service you purchase in both your personal and professional life.
- dmourati 9y agoThis is a nice way to look at the pricing model in the context of something we can all understand: Mexican food.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- kyledrake 9y agoThere's a site on Neocities we host for free that would cost $560/mo to host on Amazon's CDN. It costs me less than $5 with my current configuration (which is also a global CDN). It's way over our "soft limit", but it's an awesome site so I don't care. The important part is, I don't have to care. This isn't about slightly more expensive tacos. It's about spending $560 on tacos instead of $5. "Meh" wouldn't exactly be my first reaction to getting that bill at the taco cart (or the fanciest taco place in the world, for that matter). I can get IP transit in datacenters from $240-$600/Gb right now. So even his $960 transit cost for datacenters is off by quite a bit. He's comparing with a pretty high price and it still looks ridiculous.
- havetocharge 9y agoScrewing their customers? What kind of entitled attitude is this? This is a highly competitive market and the customers are voting with their own dollars. Don't like it? Don't eat it.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bkruse 9y agoI mentioned this in the price reductions of S3 announcement People fail to realize the true cost of operating on S3, specifically when hundreds of TB of usable data is in play "By putting the "tax" on bandwidth, a lot of these business cases are solved. I see why Amazon does that. AWS is great, but as you get into high scale (specifically in storage - 2PB+), it becomes extremely cost prohibitive."
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- clhodapp 9y agoI've always figured that the point of this was to allow a) overall costs to generally scale with the "size" of the customer while simultaneously creating a sticker shock effect on migrating out of whatever cloud. For example, looking at Google, the cost to transfer a terabyte out of their Cloud Storage product is six times the cost of just keeping it there for month. Of course some of this collapses if you really look into it (e.g. you are going to pay that egress anyway if people are actually accessing the data) but I'm not sure that that is always clear to execs doing back of envelope math. I think that to some degree this desire for lock-in is explicitly visible in the asymmetric ingress/egress pricing but I do think that it's a little bit underhanded if I am right because it would mean that slightly-deflated e.g. instance prices would be subsidized by lockin.
- Arador 9y agoAs the author of this post I need to clarify something. I love Amazon AWS, and I love the flexibility and awesomeness of cloud computing. I just don't like the bandwidth pricing ;) Sorry for the interruption, feel free to continue crucifying me. P.S. If someone has more accurate data I'd be happy to update the post or add a guest post. Cheers, Love Arador xoxox
- mikiem 9y agoAs a provider of IaaS Cloud and of dedicated servers and colo, I hear this argument all the time. No one ever seems to include the Network Engineers, monitoring systems, the routers (better have more than 1!), the switches (distribution and access layers), the maintenance, software licenses (where applicable), customer support, cost of IP addresses, Account Payable, ARIN membership, RADB membership, cross-connects, optics, spares and/or support contracts, etc... and finally, you do not use a 1Mbps at 100% for 24hrs per day, so while 1Mbps for a month is ~320GB, in reality, the way most people transfer data, 320GB would look more like 3Mbps at 95th percentile (the way burstable bandwidth is billed) A basic 1Gbps commit on a 10Gbps port in a data center might cost you from $0.50/Mbps (something like Cogent) to maybe $1.50/Mbps (let's say Level 3), other providers could be $4+/Mbps. By the time you factor in all of the above overhead costs, the true cost of the bandwidth is much much higher on a per Mbps basis. Don't forget to significantly over-build your stuff, or you might get knocked off-line for anomalies or DoS attacks. Admittedly, the scale of Google, AWS, Azure makes the cost per Mbps much much lower, but when as others have pointed out, AWS, Google, Azure don't need to charge less than they do.
- mikiem 9y agoHow could I forget electricity: A/B power for a pair of Cisco ASR 9006 routers costs us over $1,000/mo!
- pvg 9y agoA lot of the things you mention are presumably covered in the cloud provider's service prices for things other than bandwidth. Another possible explanation is that the ratio of available (or build-out-able) compute power to available bandwidth they have is such that they just can't give you cheap bandwidth and their pricing reflects that.
- donavanm 9y agoYup. I took a swag at a generalized breakdown of "data transfer" costs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7479030 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7479030 four years ago. The values might be slightly different today, the logic isnt. I suppose part of the issue is marketing. The customer reads the bill as "bandwidth." Would consumers understand better if there was a separate "network infrastructure" line item? Would they accept differntial pricing for network quality or class? Dont see why we'd find out as long as theres no downward pricing pressure.
- abalone 9y agoFundamental methodological error: It compares provisioned capacity (colo & Google Fiber) to utilization. In order for this comparison to be valid you'd need to get 100% utilization of your colo or Google Fiber pipe. You only pay for what you use with AWS et al. And quite obviously the pricing of GF and Amazon Lightsail assumes less than 100%. Nobody's getting "screwed".
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- zengid 9y agoSo is Lightsail really worth jumping into?
- kev009 9y agoFWIW cost for a small biz at most major metro US facilities is closer to $1/mbit for a multi-carrier (which means generally multi-route and high quality with some caveats), and $0.20 if you do something like he.net. For higher volume customers you can easily cut both of those rates in half right now. And you can also participate on public peering switches for generally just a low setup fee at the best facilities. AWS, GCE, azure seem like the platforms of yesteryear in all dimensions when compared to something like packet.net. I think these providers could be in a rock and a hard place due to the unsuitability of native Linux containers for secure multi-tenancy. This does leave a nice runway for Joyent as both a provider and software vendor for at least a little bit, but I think packet.net is really going to change the economy of infra.
- throwaway-1209 9y agoAmazing to see the number of people who try hard to justify this blatant rip off pricing. This is coming from the same group of people who complain endlessly about the cost of wireless data and telco data caps.
- overcyn 9y agoWith telcos, there are only a few companies to choose from. If you want to run your own dedicated servers, nothing is stopping you. So what if people want to pay more for the ease of cloud platforms?
- kernelsanderz 9y agoI would imagine contention ratios would also factor into pricing. At least in Australia you might have a 8:1 ratio of actual bandwidth available for a consumer plan, and 3:1 for a business plan. I'd imagine that you pretty much get all the bandwidth you pay for in a data centre. I've certainly saturated 100mbps connections on servers in the past, 24x7. But perhaps people more knowledgeable than me could comment on this?
- deafcalculus 9y agoI suspect the high bandwidth price is a targeting tool and is primarily for repelling those wanting to host seed boxes, porn sites and the like. You can probably get a much better deal if you're paying > 10k$/mo. Even then, cloud bandwidth is insanely expensive. For example, Hetzner offers 1.3$/TB (if you happen to exceed their generous 30 TB quota). In comparison, Amazon is 70x more expensive at 90$/TB.
- mad182 9y agoHetzner is great. I'm running a site with ~45TB monthly traffic on 3 physical servers and it costs me just over $150. I would have to pay many thousands to any cloud hosting provider and it wouldn't pay off in my case. Sure, if high availability is critical for you business and money is not an issue, it may be worth it. YMMV.
- radimm 9y agoAs others have pointed out, this view is extremely short sighted. To add to the mix - what if you need a multiple data-center deployment/replication? Both Amazon and Google will provide you a greatly discounted traffic there $0.02 / $0.01. And that's only start. You can easily migrate from one data center to another, with no or little cost attached to it (try that in colo).
- sbov 9y agoThis subject is never productive on HN because almost every reply argues with a certain use case in mind but people never actually outline that use case. Those who read your post and reply do so with their own use case in mind and obviously what that other person suggested is madness (in your scenario that you never actually verbalize). Ultimately no one learns anything because they all think everyone is in exactly the same scenario as they are. Or maybe they think their personal choice is a "silver bullet". Probably depends on the poster. Then it all repeats next week.
- zero_intp 9y agoAs an ISP architect, I think you overlook a great many cost centers in your apples-to-doughnuts explanation.