3 ms·

The high bandwidth price is mostly to drive away seedboxes and porn sites. Huge discounts are likely available to big customers.

nik736 9y ago
They could simply ban adult websites in their ToS, I doubt this is the reason. Also seed boxes are nowhere near useful if you still would pay $10 / TB and at the same time can get traffic for free at OVH or Online/Scaleway. It's most likely vendor lock-in and people are dumb enough to pay for it.
- adventured 9y ago
  The reason, is that bandwidth is a solid profit center for the cloud majors. Amazon initiated it, the rest are going along in cartel fashion, nobody wants to disrupt one of the lucrative angles by driving that profit center toward zero. There's no other rational explanation why Azure or Google aren't hammering AWS on bandwidth cost as a competitive angle. They're basically conspiring in the industrial sense, no different than airlines that somehow magically agree to simultaneously raise prices or department stores that for decades all agreed not to discount the perfume etc. box section of their stores.
  - btown 9y ago
    No need for conspiracy theories. When one market participant anchors a price at a high premium, you don't need to collude to know that undercutting them is a scorched earth strategy that causes both of you to lose. Part of this is because financial markets value your revenue more than market share, and undercutting bandwidth pricing hurts the former more than it helps the latter.
  - jpalomaki 9y ago
    High bandwidth costs also make it more costly to move some of the data processing to companies which offer very cheap dedicated servers. -- But it's not fair to say that price from Google is high just because some random hosting company gives you unmetered 500mbs for $99/month. As we have seen with many unlimited cloud storage offerings, some companies do unsustainable offers to attract customers. There are different strategies behind this. Some just count on that majority of customers won't use everything they could. Others know the price hike is inevitable, but believe customers will still stuck.
- regularfry 9y ago
  ToS means they have to police it. High prices police themselves.

nik736 9y ago

They could simply ban adult websites in their ToS, I doubt this is the reason. Also seed boxes are nowhere near useful if you still would pay $10 / TB and at the same time can get traffic for free at OVH or Online/Scaleway. It's most likely vendor lock-in and people are dumb enough to pay for it.

adventured 9y ago
The reason, is that bandwidth is a solid profit center for the cloud majors. Amazon initiated it, the rest are going along in cartel fashion, nobody wants to disrupt one of the lucrative angles by driving that profit center toward zero. There's no other rational explanation why Azure or Google aren't hammering AWS on bandwidth cost as a competitive angle. They're basically conspiring in the industrial sense, no different than airlines that somehow magically agree to simultaneously raise prices or department stores that for decades all agreed not to discount the perfume etc. box section of their stores.
- btown 9y ago
  No need for conspiracy theories. When one market participant anchors a price at a high premium, you don't need to collude to know that undercutting them is a scorched earth strategy that causes both of you to lose. Part of this is because financial markets value your revenue more than market share, and undercutting bandwidth pricing hurts the former more than it helps the latter.
- jpalomaki 9y ago
  High bandwidth costs also make it more costly to move some of the data processing to companies which offer very cheap dedicated servers. -- But it's not fair to say that price from Google is high just because some random hosting company gives you unmetered 500mbs for $99/month. As we have seen with many unlimited cloud storage offerings, some companies do unsustainable offers to attract customers. There are different strategies behind this. Some just count on that majority of customers won't use everything they could. Others know the price hike is inevitable, but believe customers will still stuck.
regularfry 9y ago
ToS means they have to police it. High prices police themselves.