4 ms·

> when in reality it is virtually free They're not paying for bandwidth, but their connections are not asymmetric, so they need to balance egress and ingress

> when in reality it is virtually free They're not paying for bandwidth, but their connections are not asymmetric, so they need to balance egress and ingress or they will incur fees or dropped traffic. The pricing is there to maintain this balance. Since they're obviously egress heavy, it makes sense for them to charge for egress, and make ingress free. People think AWS is using costs to "tax" you, what they're really doing is using to control the shape and size of their traffic.

api 3y ago
If this is true then how do so many other companies not charge this way? VPS companies that charge radically less and bare metal / colocation hosts that charge flat rates are all profitable and their networks work fine. Add to that the fact that people often explicitly choose these smaller providers because they have cheap bandwidth, meaning they're going to be a magnet for high bandwidth users like DIY CDNs, streaming, game servers, TURN servers, video conferencing relays, etc. I find it hard to believe that AWS or GCP are getting core Internet bandwidth on worse terms than much smaller companies like Vultr, Hivelocity, Datapacket, or OVH. I call BS.
- akira2501 3y ago
  The other companies have significantly different SLAs and drop packets far more readily. They also charge for bandwidth, in my experience, you get your 1TB/mo with your $5 VPS sure, but once you go over, you're facing per/GB charges that are very close to AWS default egress price. They're not a magnet for these services for the reasons I just described as you reach your per VPS limit very quickly, and to get more "cheap bandwidth" you have to be prepared to run 100s of VMs per provider, and have to consider provisioning VMs you don't need just to get access to another $5 TB of transfer, or you're just going to end up paying the per GB fee anyways. The terms aren't worse, but the service and their guarantees are different. Again, if you ask AWS for a bandwidth deal, they'll cut you one within a few minutes that will more than halve the price of your transfer if you pay up front. Which is AWSs way of saying, "if you make your usage predictable, we can make it way cheaper." Why? Because they have fixed _capacity_ on their links. The costs manage that _capacity_.
  - api 3y ago
    Digital Ocean and Vultr are a fraction of AWS pricing. Vultr is $0.01/gb. Bare metal providers are often cheaper still, selling by size of pipe rather than bytes transferred. In my experience GCP and AWS are pretty unwilling to budge on bandwidth pricing unless you are very large and making a long commitment. If you are not spending six figures a month forget about it. You may be right about SLA but I run large volume services out of bare metal providers and do not experience meaningful packet loss or down time in practice. Bandwidth costs are easily hundreds of times less than AWS or GCP.
    - akira2501 3y ago
      They'll sell you the pipe without any guarantee and some include provisions that allow them to instantaneously downgrade your pipe if they decide your servers are a traffic management problem. I can't speak to GCP, AWS is pretty generous, and they even suggest you contact them for a deal once you're in the low 5 figure range, and that's across all services in a region. If you move enough data the discount is significant and approaches overage pricing at VPS providers. I'm sure. If I were running things that were more bandwidth heavy as opposed to integration heavy, we would have gone that route as well, and we would have gone through the extra trouble of getting some provider diversity and redundancy built in. For smaller cases, they can avoid all that overhead and just trade those into bandwidth costs. Which, if your costs do get high, it's much easier to build an external caching network then it is to build a bunch of external dependent infrastructure with bare metal providers. In any case, I don't think it's that AWS is taxing it's users unfairly, I think the costs are a solid reflection of where their engineering effort and variable costs are concentrated. It seems like maintaining symmetry in bandwidth is one of those. As a customer I can use petabytes one month and then zero bytes the next month. They have link agreements with multi year terms and possible "balance payments" required if symmetry is not maintained. This type of bandwidth isn't as cheap to provide under these terms.
      - martinald 3y ago
        Hahahah. I don't even know where to start. If you think a 200x markup from list price on IP transit is a fair reflection of costs from AWS then good luck to you.

api 3y ago

If this is true then how do so many other companies not charge this way? VPS companies that charge radically less and bare metal / colocation hosts that charge flat rates are all profitable and their networks work fine. Add to that the fact that people often explicitly choose these smaller providers because they have cheap bandwidth, meaning they're going to be a magnet for high bandwidth users like DIY CDNs, streaming, game servers, TURN servers, video conferencing relays, etc. I find it hard to believe that AWS or GCP are getting core Internet bandwidth on worse terms than much smaller companies like Vultr, Hivelocity, Datapacket, or OVH. I call BS.

akira2501 3y ago
The other companies have significantly different SLAs and drop packets far more readily. They also charge for bandwidth, in my experience, you get your 1TB/mo with your $5 VPS sure, but once you go over, you're facing per/GB charges that are very close to AWS default egress price. They're not a magnet for these services for the reasons I just described as you reach your per VPS limit very quickly, and to get more "cheap bandwidth" you have to be prepared to run 100s of VMs per provider, and have to consider provisioning VMs you don't need just to get access to another $5 TB of transfer, or you're just going to end up paying the per GB fee anyways. The terms aren't worse, but the service and their guarantees are different. Again, if you ask AWS for a bandwidth deal, they'll cut you one within a few minutes that will more than halve the price of your transfer if you pay up front. Which is AWSs way of saying, "if you make your usage predictable, we can make it way cheaper." Why? Because they have fixed _capacity_ on their links. The costs manage that _capacity_.
- api 3y ago
  Digital Ocean and Vultr are a fraction of AWS pricing. Vultr is $0.01/gb. Bare metal providers are often cheaper still, selling by size of pipe rather than bytes transferred. In my experience GCP and AWS are pretty unwilling to budge on bandwidth pricing unless you are very large and making a long commitment. If you are not spending six figures a month forget about it. You may be right about SLA but I run large volume services out of bare metal providers and do not experience meaningful packet loss or down time in practice. Bandwidth costs are easily hundreds of times less than AWS or GCP.
  - akira2501 3y ago
    They'll sell you the pipe without any guarantee and some include provisions that allow them to instantaneously downgrade your pipe if they decide your servers are a traffic management problem. I can't speak to GCP, AWS is pretty generous, and they even suggest you contact them for a deal once you're in the low 5 figure range, and that's across all services in a region. If you move enough data the discount is significant and approaches overage pricing at VPS providers. I'm sure. If I were running things that were more bandwidth heavy as opposed to integration heavy, we would have gone that route as well, and we would have gone through the extra trouble of getting some provider diversity and redundancy built in. For smaller cases, they can avoid all that overhead and just trade those into bandwidth costs. Which, if your costs do get high, it's much easier to build an external caching network then it is to build a bunch of external dependent infrastructure with bare metal providers. In any case, I don't think it's that AWS is taxing it's users unfairly, I think the costs are a solid reflection of where their engineering effort and variable costs are concentrated. It seems like maintaining symmetry in bandwidth is one of those. As a customer I can use petabytes one month and then zero bytes the next month. They have link agreements with multi year terms and possible "balance payments" required if symmetry is not maintained. This type of bandwidth isn't as cheap to provide under these terms.
    - martinald 3y ago
      Hahahah. I don't even know where to start. If you think a 200x markup from list price on IP transit is a fair reflection of costs from AWS then good luck to you.