7 ms·

How is Cloudflare gonna coup up the price? These numbers are too good to be true (Sorry I am naive in how egress pricing works).

toomuchtodo 5y ago
Bandwidth is very cheap [1], cloud providers gouge. Cloudflare is using this product to disrupt other cloud providers and pull business from them. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28682237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28682237
- foobiekr 5y ago
  Yes basically. In networking everybody except for people living on a CSP buy bandwith/ports not bits moved. AWS egress is fabulously profitable specifically because they’re ripping you off vs even a very expensive colo.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
wongarsu 5y ago
They charge three times the cost for storage compared to B2 etc. Egress bandwidth in a datacenter costs around $7/TB for you or me, probably far less for a company like Cloudflare that's built around handling huge traffic volumes. Similarly they can use slow storage for most files and use their existing caching solutions for storing frequently accessed files. They'll probably lose some money on customers who use lots of bandwidth, and make lots of money on everyone else.
- capableweb 5y ago
  > Egress bandwidth in a datacenter costs around $7/TB for you or me, probably far less for a company like Cloudflare that's built around handling huge traffic volumes. Funny thing, paying for egress bandwidth is not something you do if you handle your own peering and other internet infrastructure. Paying for bandwidth is something that the cloud providers came up with to add further margin. So they likely pay $0/TB for that bandwidth.
  - mmastrac 5y ago
    CloudFlare has a good blog post on this, but effectively they pay for megabit/s capability.
    - wongarsu 5y ago
      Which is not that different from paying by the TB, as long as you are big enough that your traffic isn't too spiky. If you assume that over the day/week Cloudflare's your bandwidth usage moves between 0.5x and 1.5x of the monthly average, then paying for 1 TB/month is basically the same as paying for 4.5 megabit/s (1TB/month == 3Mb/s, multiply by 1.5 for peak demand).
inopinatus 5y ago
They're trying to drive up their volumes in the hope of obtaining more peering. This is evidently the core of Cloudflare's business strategy, emerging in practically everything they do tactically; from Matthew Prince having an epic public sook earlier this year about AWS's network team telling him to jump in a lake, to this. Peering drives down the marginal cost of bandwidth, and this is super relevant since Cloudflare's main value-add product is DDoS mitigation. Unless you're an incumbent tier 1 carrier (which is the hereditary royalty of networking), the classic ways to obtain more/better peering are either have the most eyeballs, or the most content. A typical access ISP takes the former approach, a CDN like Cloudflare takes the latter. As usual, free anything means you are the commodity being traded on.
- babelfish 5y ago
  Source on the lake thing?
  - inopinatus 5y ago
    Not a literal lake, that's just a colourful metaphor for being rebuffed. The fact of it is evident from the Cloudflare blog, but I don't particularly recommend giving that the time of day, since as with all content marketing it is also self-serving humbug.

toomuchtodo 5y ago

Bandwidth is very cheap [1], cloud providers gouge. Cloudflare is using this product to disrupt other cloud providers and pull business from them. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28682237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28682237

foobiekr 5y ago
Yes basically. In networking everybody except for people living on a CSP buy bandwith/ports not bits moved. AWS egress is fabulously profitable specifically because they’re ripping you off vs even a very expensive colo.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

wongarsu 5y ago

They charge three times the cost for storage compared to B2 etc. Egress bandwidth in a datacenter costs around $7/TB for you or me, probably far less for a company like Cloudflare that's built around handling huge traffic volumes. Similarly they can use slow storage for most files and use their existing caching solutions for storing frequently accessed files. They'll probably lose some money on customers who use lots of bandwidth, and make lots of money on everyone else.

capableweb 5y ago
> Egress bandwidth in a datacenter costs around $7/TB for you or me, probably far less for a company like Cloudflare that's built around handling huge traffic volumes. Funny thing, paying for egress bandwidth is not something you do if you handle your own peering and other internet infrastructure. Paying for bandwidth is something that the cloud providers came up with to add further margin. So they likely pay $0/TB for that bandwidth.
- mmastrac 5y ago
  CloudFlare has a good blog post on this, but effectively they pay for megabit/s capability.
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    Which is not that different from paying by the TB, as long as you are big enough that your traffic isn't too spiky. If you assume that over the day/week Cloudflare's your bandwidth usage moves between 0.5x and 1.5x of the monthly average, then paying for 1 TB/month is basically the same as paying for 4.5 megabit/s (1TB/month == 3Mb/s, multiply by 1.5 for peak demand).

inopinatus 5y ago

They're trying to drive up their volumes in the hope of obtaining more peering. This is evidently the core of Cloudflare's business strategy, emerging in practically everything they do tactically; from Matthew Prince having an epic public sook earlier this year about AWS's network team telling him to jump in a lake, to this. Peering drives down the marginal cost of bandwidth, and this is super relevant since Cloudflare's main value-add product is DDoS mitigation. Unless you're an incumbent tier 1 carrier (which is the hereditary royalty of networking), the classic ways to obtain more/better peering are either have the most eyeballs, or the most content. A typical access ISP takes the former approach, a CDN like Cloudflare takes the latter. As usual, free anything means you are the commodity being traded on.

babelfish 5y ago
Source on the lake thing?
- inopinatus 5y ago
  Not a literal lake, that's just a colourful metaphor for being rebuffed. The fact of it is evident from the Cloudflare blog, but I don't particularly recommend giving that the time of day, since as with all content marketing it is also self-serving humbug.