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AWS drops bandwidth pricing
- werner 15y agoMy blogpost w background information: http://wv.ly/iLDaqu http://wv.ly/iLDaqu
- aw3c2 15y agoDirect link: http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2011/06/aws_bandwith_price_drop_july11.html http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2011/06/aws_bandwith_pri...
- neworbit 15y agoGood lord, about time. Why was incoming bandwidth ever on the list?
- nhoss2 15y agoooh "AWS drops bandwidth pricing" come on please be true! darn it just inbound.
- timf 15y agoIt's not just inbound, see the "previous" column here: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/06/aws-lowers-its-pricing-again-free-inbound-data-transfer-and-lower-outbound-data-transfer-for-all-ser.html http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/06/aws-lowers-its-pricing-ag...
- nhoss2 15y agooh ok, I thought "drops" meant get rid of but reducing is also great
- lsc 15y agoUnlimited never is. I mean, there /is/ such thing as "don't worry about it as long as it's within an order of magnitude or so of what I expect" pricing, and that can often make a lot of sense on the low end or other places where the cost of the customer worrying about the bandwidth used is greater than the cost of providing that bandwidth... but this is not true of the 'at scale' uses of the cloud.
- benologist 15y agoOutbound looks like it's dropped a few cents too although Asia's still expensive.
- Rickasaurus 15y agoAmazon is now the #1 choice for web scrapers everywhere :)
- baltcode 15y agoI thought most AWS IP addresses were blocked by most admins. Does any one have experience scraping using Amazon.
- abronte 15y agoWe have a pretty big e-commerce scraping project, and we don't really run into many problems regarding blacklisted ip's. There are a few sites who we get consistent bans from, but with elastic ip's it's pretty much a non-issue. I have yet to see a site that ban's all amazon ip's.
- mattgreenrocks 15y agoIt is annoying when it happens and you're on something like Heroku.
- sjwright 15y agoI run http://whirlpool.net.au http://whirlpool.net.au and I religiously check the Amazon EC2 forum announcements[1] for new IP ranges to ban. [1] https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=1030 https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=1030
- MaxGabriel 15y agoFor someone inexperienced in this market, why wouldn't they just say free? I've never heard someone sell something for "$0.00"
- dmix 15y agoFree is better for singular marketing messages. But for tabular data, when you're comparing different points, keeping the unit consistent is better.
- timf 15y agoThe pricing change is better understood with the tables here which include a "previous" column: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/06/aws-lowers-its-pricing-again-free-inbound-data-transfer-and-lower-outbound-data-transfer-for-all-ser.html http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/06/aws-lowers-its-pricing-ag...
- latch 15y agoI don't even remember what the old pricing was. For the first (non-free tier), was it at 0.18? 0.12/gb is getting pretty cheap for non-bulk bandwidth of this quality. edit above poster has link showing it was 0.15
- nigelsampson 15y agoI wonder if this was in reaction to the same pricing change from MS Azure http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2011/06/22/announcing-free-ingress-for-all-windows-azure-customers-starting-july-1st-2011.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2011/06/22/anno...
- wiradikusuma 15y agothis should put some pressure on recent Google App Engine price increase (fingers crossed)
- Joakal 15y agoWhy is bandwidth pricing higher in Asia despite bandwidth rates there being among the highest in the world?
- davidu 15y agoYour question answers itself. I really don't know how much more to add, but I'll try. Transit (bandwidth) costs more there because: 1) Networks peer much less openly. 2) This is mostly due to the presence of state-run monopoly telcos. 3) That's why BW costs more. 4) Therefore, it costs more for AMZN to get transit in Asia. 5) This is why it costs more for AWS customers to use bandwidth. 6) This is why it costs more for you.
- Joakal 15y agoIt's more expensive per mbps in USA compared to Asia [0]. [0] http://www.billshrink.com/blog/5787/internet-penetration-costs/ http://www.billshrink.com/blog/5787/internet-penetration-cos... Edit: I'm assuming the data transfer rates apply to data leaving the data center in Japan -> Any computer, not USA region -> Japanese computer.
- davidu 15y agoThat's not talking about transit -- that's talking about consumer Internet connections, which are surprisingly cheap despite the same monopoly infrastructure but largely due to government price controls. That monopoly infrastructure, however, is what keeps outside providers from making inroads -- you don't see anyone but SingTel in Singapore, for instance. Or anyone besides Malaysia Telecom in Malaysia, or NTT / KDDI / etc. in Japan.
- Joakal 15y agoAh, makes sense, sort of. If there's government price controls, why was the internet monopoly company still increasing bandwidth when they are already leaders in worldwide bandwidth?
- chaselee 15y agoNow if only Google App Engine would follow suit...oh wait they raised prices =/
- tzs 15y agoThis is big. It makes it a lot cheaper for a busy site to keep an up to date mirror at Amazon on standby for use in emergencies.
- blhack 15y agoFor another comparison, voxel.net (which serves imgur): http://www.voxel.net/pricing http://www.voxel.net/pricing $0.10/GB up to 40TB $0.07/GB up to 500TB $0.05/GB >500TB This looks like the cheapest "real" CDN I've seen. Awesome :) Not that I need it [yet], but here's to hoping :)
- steelaz 15y agoThese prices apply to inbound and outbound traffic, Amazon made their inbound traffic free.
- jules 15y agoIsn't the vast majority of traffic outbound?
- meatmanek 15y agoA lot of traffic is fairly symmetric: chat, email, dropbox with two clients. EMR jobs can also have much more inbound traffic than outbound.
- sreitshamer 15y agoNot for apps that back up to S3 :)
- saurik 15y agoI use CDNetworks, and at a 50TB commit I'm getting /much/ better pricing than that... I've even been quoted better pricing than that by Akamai (which people in this industry view as notoriously expensive). I might encourage you to drop the quotes around "real" and look at actually real CDNs (the kind you have to call and negotiate pricing with): they aren't as expensive as you apparently think they are.
- blhack 15y agoAre you seriously suggesting that imgur, which is currently doing almost 1PB/month, isn't using a "real" CDN? Quotes are there because I've heard of people buying up "unlimited bandwidth" shared hosting packages, and using them as a cheap "CDN".
- zmmmmm 15y agoI'm blown away. This radically changes the cost for one of my core products (automated browsing from EC2 machines). I've thought for a long time that EC2 was getting comparatively very expensive for bandwidth (simply not decreasing their prices). I thought they would have to change it, but I didn't expect free!
- zaidf 15y agoI wouldn't be surprised if they put a fair use clause somewhere. Otherwise you could hypothetically run a fairly resource intensive bot that scrapes data 24x7 using up aws download bw for no cost.
- speckledjim 15y agoInstances are already IO bound/capped. For example, if you start up a micro instance, you'll only be able to download at like 200kbps or something. So I'd assume the connection speed is linked to the size of the instance, and the bandwidth cost is integrated into that cost somewhat.
- nolite 15y agoany more info on this? I had no idea this was the case
- meow 15y agoI don't think this is accurate. I have seen download speeds of around 6/8MBps on windows micro instances. The lowest I got was around 3MBps. But I only tried with downloads of around 30MB files at the maximum.
- jdq 15y agoThe io is burstable. Try doing a sustained large download and you will see the speed throttle down
- 15y ago
- rkalla 15y agoMaking all in-bound traffic free is a super-aggressive (and much appreciated) move. As blhack pointed out Voxel's per-GB rate[1] before AWS dropped was extremely competitive, but they charge for in and out-bound data. AWS, after the 1st of July will only charge $0.12 for out-bound data and $0.00 for inbound data, effectively making it something like $0.06/GB compared to Voxel (I'm hand-waving this a bit to make a point). Also as wiradikusuma pointed out, this comes right on the heals of Google's App Engine pricing structure change[2] to be more business-friendly (read: more expensive/more predictable billing) that upset smaller shops and individuals. As someone who reads most of the AWS forums every night, I would say overall that Amazon seems to be responding more quickly to low level failures that used to run rampant on the system (although US-EAST still has more failures than any other region. I guess due to overload). They seem like they are hitting faster/smoother, sounds like a good time to push forward and grow which I imagine this move will help do. Getting a little excited to see what the price decrease for per-GB billing on S3 will be in the coming months following this up (my assumption). [1] http://www.voxel.net/pricing http://www.voxel.net/pricing [2] http://www.korokithakis.net/posts/app-engine-pricing-changes-revisited/ http://www.korokithakis.net/posts/app-engine-pricing-changes...
- _delirium 15y agoIt also makes it really appealing for a lot of data-analysis use cases, which are increasingly being done on EC2, because it's a nice way to burst up to a temporary cluster. That use case often has large inbound traffic, as you pull down datasets (say, some genomics data), but then comparatively little outbound traffic.
- jamesbkel 15y agoIndeed, this is exactly my case: 10-100's GB of data distilled down to 1GB output at most, including extra diagnostics which are not always needed. One possible advantage for Amazon could be, at least in my use case, that I may be inclined to spin up instances for less-CPU-intensive tasks. Also, being able to rely on the widely available remote access from EC2 is convenient. I suppose if it gets me spending more time on their CPU cycles, they've picked up business. Interested to see where this policy leads.
- orijing 15y agoDropbox must be super happy that half their bandwidth costs have disappeared!
- Pahalial 15y agoThis might be very related, actually - Dropbox just sent out an email announcing downtime for a move to a different data center.
- icebraining 15y agoAlso, backup solutions based on S3. Most of their traffic is inbound.
- cperciva 15y agoAbout 90% of Tarsnap's bandwidth is inbound... but most of Tarsnap's AWS costs are for storage, not bandwidth. Backup services tend to store a lot of cold data.
- nuclear_eclipse 15y agoAs a Tarsnap customer, would this allow you to stop charging on sending data to Tarsnap, or does that still cost you somewhere in the lineup?
- cperciva 15y agoTarsnap's upload costs cover the actual bandwith costs, the per-operation cost of S3 PUTs, the SimpleDB operations for checking account balances, some data storage (when you delete data, you stop paying for it; but I pay until the garbage collection job reaps those blocks)... there are lots of costs. The bandwidth was a significant part of it, though. I need to crunch some numbers and see how the economics work out before I can commit to anything, but I'm certainly looking at adjusting the pricing.
- nuclear_eclipse 15y ago
- sriramk 15y agoThis is probably a move in response to Windows Azure dropping its inbound data transfer rates to zero last week. When I was back in Windows Azure, we would often see AWS try to do a price-match whenever we changed prices drastically.
- tybris 15y agoI know Amazon pays very little attention to competitors. However, their customers might have asked them to lower prices in response to Azure.
- sriramk 15y agoI doubt they process customer feedback in the matter of a few days :). Besides, there's a history of AMZN doing things just before or just after a Windows Azure announcement. See their announcements always timed the week before MIX or PDC or the response to various other pricing changes, etc. Trust me, Amazon keeps a very close watch on the competition. :)
- Poiesis 15y agoCan't comment as to what AWS does, but Amazon itself pays a ton of attention to competitors, employing things like screen-scraping bots to keep track of competitors' pricing.
- aolnerd 15y agoWe're looking for even cheaper bandwidth for streaming audio. Can anyone recommend a vendor to provide 150mbit+ bandwidth on a vps platform or rented server platform?
- kmfrk 15y agoThe timing for this Django deployment script couldn't have been better: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2700120 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2700120. I was going to look into deployment scripts for App Engine, but Amazon makes it more compelling to use AWS.
- MrAlmostWrong 15y agoEverytime I see a price drop my first though is always, "I wonder how much this increases Dropbox's revenue?"
- anamax 15y agoI wonder how soon/if tarsnap will update their pricing.
- cperciva 15y agoIt might happen. I need to crunch some numbers. It won't be overnight, though.