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> They charge an arm and a leg because they want to keep you and your data on their platform. When you move it you are breaking free. This isn't remotely true.

> They charge an arm and a leg because they want to keep you and your data on their platform. When you move it you are breaking free. This isn't remotely true. The bandwidth alliance exists, and a lot of cloud companies are on the list: https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/bandwidth-alliance/ https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/bandwidth-alliance/ The actual answer is much more complicated. For example, Google Cloud offers two different bandwidth tiers: premium and standard. The calculation on the OP assumes premium since that's the default option, but obviously it's much more expensive. Google cloud's "premium" bandwidth is much akin to AWS Global Accelerator since it utilizes Google's own backbone network for as long as possible before exiting at the nearest peering point between Google and whatever ISP your end user is at. AWS Global Accelerator has some other options available, that make it fundamentally a different product, but the routing characteristics are much more similar to GCP Premium bandwidth than anything else AWS offers.

toast0 3y ago
> For example, Google Cloud offers two different bandwidth tiers: premium and standard. The calculation on the OP assumes premium since that's the default option, but obviously it's much more expensive. Of course, non-premium tier is v4 only, and only available at some locations.
- ehhthing 3y ago
  If you're on GCP because you want v6 support you're probably in the wrong place :^)
  - toast0 3y ago
    It's better than AWS at IPv6, from what I can tell? I didn't pick the hosting I'm working with, but GCP IPv6 for instances seems to work fine, other than it costs more?
teraflop 3y ago
Google's "standard" bandwidth pricing is about 15%-45% cheaper than "premium", which is admittedly a significant discount, but it's still an order of magnitude more expensive than some of the other options on the list.
acdha 3y ago
The bandwidth alliance exists to try to cut into AWS’ business. They could always have unilaterally cut rates closer to their cost but that margin was appealing, until they realized that they were never going to catch up with AWS without being cheaper.
- ehhthing 3y ago
  This is also a fair take, but not a very compelling reason why bandwidth costs are vendor lock in...
  - acdha 3y ago
    High egress makes it expense both to leave and to use other services: if you use S3, you’re probably putting processing and analysis in AWS because using someone else’s service would incur hefty egress charges.
Scubabear68 3y ago
That’s an impressive word salad, but sorry, no. Egress costs are high strictly to keep you there. This is why egress is dirt cheap on other platforms outside the big 3 cloud providers. This is also why ingress is free.
- ehhthing 3y ago
  Ingress is free because it helps them balance their pipes, and it would be really shitty to charge for DDoS attacks. As far as I can tell, with the exception of some really expensive network environments (e.g. China), nobody has ever charged for ingress. With an exception to OVH, none of the cheap providers the article has listed have any kind of backbone network. They all rely fully on transit providers. Turns out backbone networks are expensive to operate! OVH is the sole example of a provider that has a backbone network, and admittedly, it's pretty good. However, nowhere near expansive as the big three, and it falls flat in Asia (which is the hardest to route traffic in). Also OVH has to build datacenters so cheaply that one of them burnt to the ground in recent years... (Cloudflare has a backbone too, but you have to pay a lot extra to use it. Linode uses the Akamai backbone now but that's a very recent acquisition and it's expected that Akamai will eventually raise costs significantly) Yes, bandwidth is way too expensive on cloud providers. AWS Lightsail is proof of that. However, I see no reason to believe that this is purely for vendor locking, and nobody has been able to give any evidence of causation between the two beyond "well it's so expensive!!!"
  - Nevermark 3y ago
    > Ingress is free because it helps them balance their pipes That isn't how business works. Companies maximize their profits and "balance" isn't a profit center. If it didn't benefit them in some customer leveraging way, they would charge for ingress. You pay for everything. Either directly or indirectly. Indirectly often turns out to be much more expensive.
    - ehhthing 3y ago
      > That isn't how business works. Companies maximize their profits and "balance" isn't a profit center. If it didn't benefit them in some customer leveraging way, they would charge for ingress. What I'm referring to is the practice of balancing peering ratios. That is, when you make transit/peering arrangements with other ISPs, some ISPs will charge more if the amount of data you're sending to them vs the amount of data you're receiving from them is not balanced. It is in Google's best financial interest to at least try to balance their pipes in this way.
foofie 3y ago
> This isn't remotely true. Nothing in your comment rejects or disproves the claim that egress costs are vendor lockdown. Your link to the bandwidth alliance explicitly states that their justification for network costs is unloading infrastructure costs onto end users as data fees. That's their only and best justification. This is clearly a business decision that has no bearing in operational costs. Some cloud providers charge nothing, others only start charging after hitting a high threshold from a single instance. Do they not operate infrastructure? It's their business, it's their business model. Some restaurants charge you for a glass of tap water too. Let's not pretend they do it because of infrastructure costs.
- ehhthing 3y ago
  > Some cloud providers charge nothing, others only start charging after hitting a high threshold from a single instance. Do they not operate infrastructure? Yes you do pay for the rest of their infrastructure when you rent servers from them... I'm not saying that the fees aren't extremely overpriced. I know what a gigabit port costs. But saying it's to keep vendor locking is just not true, and nobody has suggested any actual proof of it being true.

toast0 3y ago

> For example, Google Cloud offers two different bandwidth tiers: premium and standard. The calculation on the OP assumes premium since that's the default option, but obviously it's much more expensive. Of course, non-premium tier is v4 only, and only available at some locations.

ehhthing 3y ago
If you're on GCP because you want v6 support you're probably in the wrong place :^)
- toast0 3y ago
  It's better than AWS at IPv6, from what I can tell? I didn't pick the hosting I'm working with, but GCP IPv6 for instances seems to work fine, other than it costs more?

teraflop 3y ago

Google's "standard" bandwidth pricing is about 15%-45% cheaper than "premium", which is admittedly a significant discount, but it's still an order of magnitude more expensive than some of the other options on the list.

acdha 3y ago

The bandwidth alliance exists to try to cut into AWS’ business. They could always have unilaterally cut rates closer to their cost but that margin was appealing, until they realized that they were never going to catch up with AWS without being cheaper.

ehhthing 3y ago
This is also a fair take, but not a very compelling reason why bandwidth costs are vendor lock in...
- acdha 3y ago
  High egress makes it expense both to leave and to use other services: if you use S3, you’re probably putting processing and analysis in AWS because using someone else’s service would incur hefty egress charges.

Scubabear68 3y ago

That’s an impressive word salad, but sorry, no. Egress costs are high strictly to keep you there. This is why egress is dirt cheap on other platforms outside the big 3 cloud providers. This is also why ingress is free.

ehhthing 3y ago
Ingress is free because it helps them balance their pipes, and it would be really shitty to charge for DDoS attacks. As far as I can tell, with the exception of some really expensive network environments (e.g. China), nobody has ever charged for ingress. With an exception to OVH, none of the cheap providers the article has listed have any kind of backbone network. They all rely fully on transit providers. Turns out backbone networks are expensive to operate! OVH is the sole example of a provider that has a backbone network, and admittedly, it's pretty good. However, nowhere near expansive as the big three, and it falls flat in Asia (which is the hardest to route traffic in). Also OVH has to build datacenters so cheaply that one of them burnt to the ground in recent years... (Cloudflare has a backbone too, but you have to pay a lot extra to use it. Linode uses the Akamai backbone now but that's a very recent acquisition and it's expected that Akamai will eventually raise costs significantly) Yes, bandwidth is way too expensive on cloud providers. AWS Lightsail is proof of that. However, I see no reason to believe that this is purely for vendor locking, and nobody has been able to give any evidence of causation between the two beyond "well it's so expensive!!!"
- Nevermark 3y ago
  > Ingress is free because it helps them balance their pipes That isn't how business works. Companies maximize their profits and "balance" isn't a profit center. If it didn't benefit them in some customer leveraging way, they would charge for ingress. You pay for everything. Either directly or indirectly. Indirectly often turns out to be much more expensive.
  - ehhthing 3y ago
    > That isn't how business works. Companies maximize their profits and "balance" isn't a profit center. If it didn't benefit them in some customer leveraging way, they would charge for ingress. What I'm referring to is the practice of balancing peering ratios. That is, when you make transit/peering arrangements with other ISPs, some ISPs will charge more if the amount of data you're sending to them vs the amount of data you're receiving from them is not balanced. It is in Google's best financial interest to at least try to balance their pipes in this way.

foofie 3y ago

> This isn't remotely true. Nothing in your comment rejects or disproves the claim that egress costs are vendor lockdown. Your link to the bandwidth alliance explicitly states that their justification for network costs is unloading infrastructure costs onto end users as data fees. That's their only and best justification. This is clearly a business decision that has no bearing in operational costs. Some cloud providers charge nothing, others only start charging after hitting a high threshold from a single instance. Do they not operate infrastructure? It's their business, it's their business model. Some restaurants charge you for a glass of tap water too. Let's not pretend they do it because of infrastructure costs.

ehhthing 3y ago
> Some cloud providers charge nothing, others only start charging after hitting a high threshold from a single instance. Do they not operate infrastructure? Yes you do pay for the rest of their infrastructure when you rent servers from them... I'm not saying that the fees aren't extremely overpriced. I know what a gigabit port costs. But saying it's to keep vendor locking is just not true, and nobody has suggested any actual proof of it being true.