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Egress pricing for Google and AWS (sans Lightsail) continues to be one of the biggest price differences between them and smaller hosts such as Linode and Digita

Egress pricing for Google and AWS (sans Lightsail) continues to be one of the biggest price differences between them and smaller hosts such as Linode and DigitalOcean. I think Google missed an opportunity here. They should have cut the prices more significantly for standard tier (sacrificing performance) to make this more competitive. Right now Linode's and DO's smallest $5 plan offers 1TB of transfer, which would cost $85.00 on Google's new standard plan.

manigandham 9y ago
Are major clouds actually facing any real competition because of bandwidth pricing? On another note, Softlayer used to have generous multiple TB allocations for their dedicated servers but they took them away. It's likely that anyone needing high bandwidth, especially for static content, will have other edge networks and CDNs in place for that use case.
- user5994461 9y ago
  Of course not. They are not competing with Digital Ocean / Linode at all.
  - jstapels 9y ago
    If that's true, why did Amazon come out with Lightsail? https://amazonlightsail.com https://amazonlightsail.com
    - deusex_ 9y ago
      That's just a card to be in the game, it's hardly their mainline product.
      - needcheapbw 9y ago
        My Lightsail gives me 3TB. It's a huge card for me. The only reason I use them at all for hosting.
        oblio 9y ago
        Sorry to be blunt, but they don't really care that much about you. Sure, they want to take your money, they don't want to leave it on the table. But most of their money comes from the Netflixes and the Adobes of the world, not from mom-and-pop stores :p
        needcheapbw 9y ago
        :-) Well Bezos is a genius, perhaps he will figure out that mom and pop businesses are the backbone of the world economy.
        oblio 9y ago
        Based on how the AWS services look, I somehow doubt it. Cloud Formation, RDS Oracle, to name a few thing, seem quite enteprise-y :)
fabian2k 9y ago
The extremely high egress prices for any cloud don't seem to have hurt their popularity much so far. So I suspect they all don't want to give up their cash cow. Compared to a VPS or renting a dedicated servers, the egress costs can be enormous if you come even close to using the traffic contingent you get with many VPS or dedicated hosts. Just as a comparison, a dedicated server with Hetzner for ~50-70 EUR per month includes 30 TB of traffic, which would be at least 2,400 EUR on the Google Cloud.
- notyourday 9y ago
  Just put the edges somewhere else, use GCP for compute and push the actual delivery to the edge.
- posguy 9y ago
  Huh? VPS and dedicated hosts usually charge below a penny per gigabyte over your traffic limit, and if you open a support ticket they will usually work with you towards something in the sub-$4 per TB range.
ProblemFactory 9y ago
> biggest price differences between them and smaller hosts such as Linode and DigitalOcean. I suspect that the smaller hosts' plans traffic quota is sold below their own cost - assuming (correctly) that the vast majority of customers would not use anywhere close to the limit. The traffic quota also scales much slower than the price as you move to bigger, more expensive plans. I guess that it's fine if you reach the limit on a few servers, but if you rented 1000 x $5 droplets from Linode/DigitalOcean, and maxed out all of their traffic quota, you would get kicked out. Has someone tried to use these hosts just for cheap file servers?
- blfr 9y ago
  I don't know about DO Droplets but you can get a reasonably priced dedicated server* at OVH and knock yourself out piping 4-8 TB to the world for ~$40/mo. * It's hard to push a lot of useful data with a tiny VPS.
  - needcheapbw 9y ago
    OVH isn't an American company, that probably matters to a lot of use cases.
    - X-Istence 9y ago
      OVH has a datacenter in Canada which is very well connected to North America, they are also working on their USA datacenter.
      - needcheapbw 9y ago
        A US location will be welcome. Might have to start using a real server for a change.
- needcheapbw 9y ago
  > if you rented 1000 x $5 droplets from Linode/DigitalOcean, and maxed out all of their traffic quota, you would get kicked out. It might happen but it doesn't refute the parent's point: "Right now Linode's and DO's smallest $5 plan offers 1TB of transfer, which would cost $85.00 on Google's new standard plan."

manigandham 9y ago

Are major clouds actually facing any real competition because of bandwidth pricing? On another note, Softlayer used to have generous multiple TB allocations for their dedicated servers but they took them away. It's likely that anyone needing high bandwidth, especially for static content, will have other edge networks and CDNs in place for that use case.

user5994461 9y ago
Of course not. They are not competing with Digital Ocean / Linode at all.
- jstapels 9y ago
  If that's true, why did Amazon come out with Lightsail? https://amazonlightsail.com https://amazonlightsail.com
  - deusex_ 9y ago
    That's just a card to be in the game, it's hardly their mainline product.
    - needcheapbw 9y ago
      My Lightsail gives me 3TB. It's a huge card for me. The only reason I use them at all for hosting.
      - oblio 9y ago
        Sorry to be blunt, but they don't really care that much about you. Sure, they want to take your money, they don't want to leave it on the table. But most of their money comes from the Netflixes and the Adobes of the world, not from mom-and-pop stores :p
        needcheapbw 9y ago
        :-) Well Bezos is a genius, perhaps he will figure out that mom and pop businesses are the backbone of the world economy.
        oblio 9y ago
        Based on how the AWS services look, I somehow doubt it. Cloud Formation, RDS Oracle, to name a few thing, seem quite enteprise-y :)

fabian2k 9y ago

The extremely high egress prices for any cloud don't seem to have hurt their popularity much so far. So I suspect they all don't want to give up their cash cow. Compared to a VPS or renting a dedicated servers, the egress costs can be enormous if you come even close to using the traffic contingent you get with many VPS or dedicated hosts. Just as a comparison, a dedicated server with Hetzner for ~50-70 EUR per month includes 30 TB of traffic, which would be at least 2,400 EUR on the Google Cloud.

notyourday 9y ago
Just put the edges somewhere else, use GCP for compute and push the actual delivery to the edge.
posguy 9y ago
Huh? VPS and dedicated hosts usually charge below a penny per gigabyte over your traffic limit, and if you open a support ticket they will usually work with you towards something in the sub-$4 per TB range.

ProblemFactory 9y ago

> biggest price differences between them and smaller hosts such as Linode and DigitalOcean. I suspect that the smaller hosts' plans traffic quota is sold below their own cost - assuming (correctly) that the vast majority of customers would not use anywhere close to the limit. The traffic quota also scales much slower than the price as you move to bigger, more expensive plans. I guess that it's fine if you reach the limit on a few servers, but if you rented 1000 x $5 droplets from Linode/DigitalOcean, and maxed out all of their traffic quota, you would get kicked out. Has someone tried to use these hosts just for cheap file servers?

blfr 9y ago
I don't know about DO Droplets but you can get a reasonably priced dedicated server* at OVH and knock yourself out piping 4-8 TB to the world for ~$40/mo. * It's hard to push a lot of useful data with a tiny VPS.
- needcheapbw 9y ago
  OVH isn't an American company, that probably matters to a lot of use cases.
  - X-Istence 9y ago
    OVH has a datacenter in Canada which is very well connected to North America, they are also working on their USA datacenter.
    - needcheapbw 9y ago
      A US location will be welcome. Might have to start using a real server for a change.
needcheapbw 9y ago
> if you rented 1000 x $5 droplets from Linode/DigitalOcean, and maxed out all of their traffic quota, you would get kicked out. It might happen but it doesn't refute the parent's point: "Right now Linode's and DO's smallest $5 plan offers 1TB of transfer, which would cost $85.00 on Google's new standard plan."