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I'm actually very curious: why is bandwidth so much cheaper on more traditional VPS or dedicated server hosts like Hetzner ? This extends to their somewhat new-

I'm actually very curious: why is bandwidth so much cheaper on more traditional VPS or dedicated server hosts like Hetzner ? This extends to their somewhat new-ish cloud product, where you get 20TB traffic included - even on a tiny instance. And it's 1 Euro per TB after that. [1] Do they just decide to not profit from bandwidth or are they doing something special that allows them to be so cheap? [1] https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/ https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/general/traffic/

mrkurt 4y ago
There are three ways to manage bandwidth prices: 1. Put servers where bandwidth is cheap (not Sydney, for example) 2. Constrain throughput per server 3. Buy from cheap transit providers like Cogent Hetzner does all three. Bandwidth in the US/EU is very cheap. They meter total throughput on their services. And they use cheap providers. None of these are bad choices, just different than ours. Our product has multiple layers, too. When you connect to a Fly app, you hit our edge, then traffic goes to a VM that's probably in another region. When you hit a hetzner server, there are no intermediate hops. We usually pay that three times as data moves from customer VMs to our edges to end users (out from our edge to worker vm, out from worker vm to our edge, out from our edge to end user). Or 10x, in some cases, if data moves from Virginia to Chennai to an end user. We pay $0.005/GB in the US and $0.9/GB in Chennai. You can see how this might add up. :)
- boundlessdreamz 4y ago
  The chennai pricing in incredibly steep. It's weird that bandwidth prices for end-users in India is among the cheapest (if not the cheapest) in the world but enterprise customers are paying so much.
  - donavanm 4y ago
    Jio and friends are (were?) subsidizing connectivity and trying to drive growth to make it up later/elsewhere like payments and services. Service providers come to the opposite problem. Local infra sucks, the market is full of incumbents, and india is generally protective of those markets. Very similar dynamics with china as well.
- mrkurt 4y ago
  $0.9 is a typo, I meant $0.09/GB in Chennai. We're not taking that much of a haircut.
- snark42 4y ago
  You forgot play the peering game which can lead to substantially cheaper bandwidth when you connect to enough Tier1/2 ISPs. I think Hetzner does this some as well.
chillfox 4y ago
I would love to hear the answer to this as well. My guess is that they either don't profit from bandwidth or they have peering agreements from back when the internet was young.
getcrunk 4y ago
transit pricing can still be had readily for ~.10 cents per megabit. that's per second mind you. so you pay for capacity not for bits transferred. {$cloudprovider} makes a sweet margin by upselling that to you in terms of bytes transferred. CF wrote a post explaining it [1] Obviously, you would need to manage servers,colo,network and keep it up on your own, or pay for it. And cloud providers offer alot of value as well. but if you are at the right scale you can diy it (in-house ops/network team) you can save ALOT of money. 1 - https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/

mrkurt 4y ago

There are three ways to manage bandwidth prices: 1. Put servers where bandwidth is cheap (not Sydney, for example) 2. Constrain throughput per server 3. Buy from cheap transit providers like Cogent Hetzner does all three. Bandwidth in the US/EU is very cheap. They meter total throughput on their services. And they use cheap providers. None of these are bad choices, just different than ours. Our product has multiple layers, too. When you connect to a Fly app, you hit our edge, then traffic goes to a VM that's probably in another region. When you hit a hetzner server, there are no intermediate hops. We usually pay that three times as data moves from customer VMs to our edges to end users (out from our edge to worker vm, out from worker vm to our edge, out from our edge to end user). Or 10x, in some cases, if data moves from Virginia to Chennai to an end user. We pay $0.005/GB in the US and $0.9/GB in Chennai. You can see how this might add up. :)

boundlessdreamz 4y ago
The chennai pricing in incredibly steep. It's weird that bandwidth prices for end-users in India is among the cheapest (if not the cheapest) in the world but enterprise customers are paying so much.
- donavanm 4y ago
  Jio and friends are (were?) subsidizing connectivity and trying to drive growth to make it up later/elsewhere like payments and services. Service providers come to the opposite problem. Local infra sucks, the market is full of incumbents, and india is generally protective of those markets. Very similar dynamics with china as well.
mrkurt 4y ago
$0.9 is a typo, I meant $0.09/GB in Chennai. We're not taking that much of a haircut.
snark42 4y ago
You forgot play the peering game which can lead to substantially cheaper bandwidth when you connect to enough Tier1/2 ISPs. I think Hetzner does this some as well.

chillfox 4y ago

I would love to hear the answer to this as well. My guess is that they either don't profit from bandwidth or they have peering agreements from back when the internet was young.

getcrunk 4y ago

transit pricing can still be had readily for ~.10 cents per megabit. that's per second mind you. so you pay for capacity not for bits transferred. {$cloudprovider} makes a sweet margin by upselling that to you in terms of bytes transferred. CF wrote a post explaining it [1] Obviously, you would need to manage servers,colo,network and keep it up on your own, or pay for it. And cloud providers offer alot of value as well. but if you are at the right scale you can diy it (in-house ops/network team) you can save ALOT of money. 1 - https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/