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>for some reason they just completely overcharge on bandwidth People say this about AWS/GCP/Azure. They are so willing to compete on cost on everything else th
by cthalupa 9y ago
>for some reason they just completely overcharge on bandwidth
People say this about AWS/GCP/Azure. They are so willing to compete on cost on everything else that it seems odd like this would be true, so I have a different theory:
OVH/etc are all able to massively oversell bandwidth. Most customers do not use it. This is fine, and not anything I think they're doing wrong!
But the "Big 3" are all about automatically scaling resources. With my own applications, I find that if I am scaling up/out, my network traffic is growing at a commensurate rate. Whereas back in the day when I was using SoftLayer or other places where I leased dedicated servers, I was not using anywhere near the included bandwidth.
It's easy to sell 1TB at the price of 100GB if people, on average, are only using 100GB. But then you have to sell 1TB at the price of 1TB if people, on average, are using that 1TB.
- foepys 9y agoBut that's how the internet works in general. An ISP doesn't have a 500,000 * 100 MBit/s connection in a city to enable simultaneous downloads from all customers at once.
- cthalupa 9y agoI'm not claiming otherwise - just that my theory (and I have no actual evidence beyond the anecdotal) is that the big cloud providers aren't "overcharging" for bandwidth, just that they cannot offer discounts from oversubscription that others may be able to.
- patrickg_zill 9y agoIt's a distinction without a difference though. If you use 1TB of data on Amazon or on OVH, and one service costs you $x and the other costs you 20% of $x you've got the same service for less money.
- closeparen 9y agoYour cheap OVH bandwidth is paid for by overcharging less intensive users. Since Amazon charges exactly what you use, it’s a great deal if you’re below average, and a bad deal if you’re above average.
- patrickg_zill 9y agoIt's exactly the same model used by fitness clubs worldwide. And Comcast cable Internet, Google Fiber, every DSL provider, even every cellular data provider. Current true bandwidth costs about $0.50 (50 USD cents) per Mbps, per month, sometimes even less. Average 1 month usage of a 1Mbps link that has Internet traffic on it is about 175-210GBytes. Literally less than 1/3rd of 1 penny, per GB of data.
- e12e 9y agoSo what about the cdns? They're all overselling too? Otherwise they'd obviously have to charge amazon prices? From eg Hetzner and other less affordable hosts (and from second hand comments here on hn about bandwidth is where amazon has ridiculously high margins) - I'll venture that the "cloud" providers get away with it because on average "actual" bandwidth correlate with "actual" usage: and hence correlate with actual users that pay or are worth paying "for". I get 30tb/month bw with my 50/month hetzner dedicated server (along with 1gps uplink). And I can actually use that. I can't even see backing stuff up to a typical "cloud" provider, because testing restore of a single tb of data/month would be too expensive.
- bauruine 9y agoHetzner is charging € 1.00 per TB after you used all the included bandwidth and they are making a profit with that. [0] [0] https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Traffic/en#Option_1 https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Traffic/en#Option_1