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On AWS or GCP the cost per GB transferred is around $0.10. Even if you put a cheap CDN on top, it costs around $0.01 per GB. How is it possible that Hetzner (a
by zawerf 8y ago
On AWS or GCP the cost per GB transferred is around $0.10. Even if you put a cheap CDN on top, it costs around $0.01 per GB.
How is it possible that Hetzner (and other unmetered hosting) are giving it out for free? If you max out the 1 Gbit for a month that's ~300 TB.
GCP and AWS would've charged you $30,000 for that!!! Are the cloud providers just not competing with each other on price? How has the price remained so high for so long?
- brianwawok 8y agoTake a latency benchmark for a hetzner server in a crowded DC streaming GBs of data and GCP. I suspect you will see a quality difference over time. That said many apps can deal with more latency. Image sharing sites would care more about cost vs latency compared to a multiplayer game. GCE introduced a tier of lower perf but cheaper network. Hopefully the trend continues.
- lfittl 8y agoQuality of the backbone matters - Hetzner is going for the cheapest it can find, and (presumably) peering where it can, with whomever it can find. AWS and GCP both have much more investment into their own backbone, plus higher quality transit providers.
- JoshTriplett 8y agoAmortization helps; even if you offer unmetered bandwidth, relatively few people will max it out 24/7. So even if they offer unmetered 100Mbps or unmetered 1Gbps, their net bandwidth won't necessarily be customers * 1Gbps.
- berns 8y ago> Are the cloud providers just not competing with each other on price? You mean the big three. Other cloud providers are certainly competing: Digital Ocean is $0.01/GB, Oracle Cloud $0.0085/GB, OVH and Scaleway are unmetered.
- inapis 8y agoSo bandwidth is actually very cheap. It certainly costs nowhere as much as AWS/GCP charge. Some reports peg their margins on bandwidth at >90%. That said, I've frequently seen parallels between razor + razor blades pricing and how AWS/GCP price compute vs bandwidth. Computing is cheap, by some measures, but almost all customers will egress that data somewhere and once you've done your computation, you'll pony up whatever prices they demand for letting that data "egress"
- southerndrift 8y agoAt e.g. 3GHz and 8 cores, you only have 24 instructions to calculate one bit. I guess the limit is the processor.
- walrus01 8y agoAWS and Google's ASNs are big enough that they probably buy very little transit at all, it all goes out peering ports at major IX points. And PNIs for bgp sessions with major carriers (example: Comcast, RCN, Shaw, Verizon)
- earenndil 8y agoGenerally, cpus (especially modern xeons) run quite a few instructions every cycle.
- walrus01 8y agoA really big ISP like hetzner is moving more than 65% of their traffic out settlement free peering by PNIs at major carrier hotels and/or at IXes. Second answer, because nowhere near all of the customers will use all of the capacity all the time. Economics of ISP oversubscription.