7 ms·
Storage is cheap, but data transfer out is still $0.12/GB, over 10x more expensive than other options.
by TillE 13y ago
Storage is cheap, but data transfer out is still $0.12/GB, over 10x more expensive than other options.
- mdasen 13y agoNot to disagree, but what other options? Google and Rackspace charge the same. DreamObjects charges $0.05/GB in transfer, but still charges $0.05 for storage. Azure is still the same $0.12/GB. I don't disagree that $0.12/GB could be considered expensive, but S3's competitors seem to be charging the same.
- sdesol 13y agoI actually use DigitalOcean as a cheap download server for my product. $5 gets you 1TB, then its $0.02/GB
- paulrosenzweig 13y agoHow much bandwidth are you using? I'd wonder if they throttle you at some point. I'm sure they're not expecting people to use that whole TB.
- icelancer 13y agoI use multiple instances (20-40) of 1 TB bandwidth pretty regularly with no throttling as of yet.
- sdesol 13y agoYeah I think they realize, like most vendors, that most people don't even come remotely close to using that much bandwidth. Even using them as a proxy for nextflix will probably just end up being 300G a month.
- DenisM 13y agoOn the other hand, S3 <-> EC2 transfer is free of bandwidth costs (there are still per-request costs though).
- toomuchtodo 13y agoAlso, inbound traffic is free.
- rpedela 13y agoWithin the same region, yes. Not in the same region, then whatever the inter-region bandwidth costs are.
- davidjgraph 13y agoThis was my take-away from the Google Cloud pricing changes yesterday. By reducing CPU costs, my bandwidth just becomes even more the dominant cost, so further reductions help me less and less. AWS users will end up with the same problem in time. I wonder why the bandwidth costs are so subborn, does the cost price per traffic unit really never come down, or is someone (some people) in the infrastructure layer(s) screwing us?
- toomuchtodo 13y agoAt the scale large providers operate at, they don't pay per GB, they pay at the 95th percentile for Gb/10Gb links. It's the same way you pay a fixed hourly rate (in most cases) for your retail electricity, and your provider is paying wholesale spot market rates that can fluctuate in ~5 minute windows. TL;DR You're paying for consistency and abstraction away from the underlying IP transport costs.
- wmf 13y agoTransit costs less than $1/Mbps/month, which works out to only a few cents/GB. It still looks like pretty high markup.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoYou're assuming its only the transit cost (as does my original cost); it could also be to discourage use of S3 for mass public serving due to architectural constraints. My understanding is that S3 is near indestructible from a serving perspective, but it may be computationally expensive for AWS to scale up/scale down for bursty/peaking outbound traffic serving needs. Another possibility is that Amazon doesn't charge for inbound, but charges a premium for outbound to balance their traffic ratios so they can peer with providers vs having to buy their transit. The free inbound traffic to S3 offsets their outbound traffic not only from AWS, but their consumer-facing web properties. As always, just my assumptions/observations.
- tedivm 13y agoIn my opinion they're doing that on purpose to discourage people from using S3 as both a storage and a transfer method. Storage and Delivery should be considered separate, as there are benefits to it being a separate service. If you throw a CDN between your customers and S3 you'll not only get a significantly lower cost, you'll also give your customers much better performance.
- Kudos 13y agoIn that case, where's the price drop on Cloudfront?
- tedivm 13y agoPersonally I would not use the Amazon CDN. It's not as cost effective as others, and CDN services are basically commodified at this point.
- Rifu 13y agoWould you happen to have recommendations for other CDN services?
- toomuchtodo 13y agoAkamai on the high end, Fastly for a startup or mid-sized business.
- thinkindie 13y agolooks like that fastly and cloudfront pricing is not that much different, they apply pretty much the same prices for traffic and requests in each of their zones. http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/ https://www.fastly.com/pricing https://www.fastly.com/pricing
- giovannibajo1 13y agoWe use cdn77 and are happy with the service. They're cheap and they properly route Google DNS users (lots of them), since they support edns-client-subnet.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoWhich is why you should be relying heavily on a caching layer outside of AWS. You're not serving objects directly from S3, are you? A big no-no if you care about latency at all (S3 from time to time will take upwards of ~500ms to serve HTTP GET requests). EDIT: Example: We use Akamai as our caching layer, as their bandwidth costs are much less than Cloudfront (their analytics are better as well, and they don't charge for invalidations like Cloudfront does). We use S3 as the origin as its a lower cost per GB than Akamai's NetStorage, and the S3 API is superior to work with compared to the interfaces exposed by NetStorage (scp/ftp/rsync).
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- copergi 13y agoWhat "other options"? You mean sketchy "free 9000 exabytes/month of bandwidth" low end hosting places like hetzner? Those are not alternatives to AWS or azure or google cloud. And those bandwidth costs do not reflect reality, they assume most people use almost none of that bandwidth. The bandwidth still costs the same, just the big users are getting the small users to pay for their bandwidth costs.
- seunosewa 13y agoThat doesn't change the fact that you pay much less for much more.
- copergi 13y agoOn a completely different service. Which is the point. I get more food for $10 at burger king than I do at a hotel, but that doesn't make burger king a replacement for hotels.
- dediserv 13y agoThere are lots of other options. While they may not all be "cloud" providers, there is a wealth of VPS and dedicated server providers in almost all countries you can name. I have no idea why you are picking on Hetzner in particular. They offer clearly defined bandwidth packages with their servers (20-50 TB) and charge for overages (0.2 cents per GB). Hetzner is perhaps not what you would call a premium provider, but their prices are about in line with industry wholesale rates. For example a very high quality provider that competes with Hetzner in their home market charge 0.4 cents per GB and they are happy to deliver any traffic you can serve at that price point.
- rsync 13y agoI hesitate to even post, as offsite backup is very different than the use case for S3, but we're the opposite... That is, our storage is expensive (10c per GB, per month, with the HN-new-customer discount) but our usage/transfwer costs are zero. related: ssh user@rsync.net s3cmd get s3://rsynctest/mscdex.exe interoperability!
- donavanm 13y agoLets put some math on the network costs. An oft quoted cost is $1/mb at p95 for decent transit. 1 mbs * 2,592,000 seconds = 2,592,000 mb per month, / (8 * 1024 gigabytes) = 316GB transferred per month. Dividing our $1 / 316GB = $0.0031 per GB transferred _at a constant 1mbs_. However most networks have sine wave pattern diurnal utilization. A common peak to average ration would be 3:1. Our $0.0031 is effectively the rate for an average of 1mbs. To get that average rate we'll be paying about 3x, or $0.0093 per GB transferred. So we're paying $0.01 per GB for the transit alone. This is also in a major metro area in North America. Transit costs can easily be 3-10x in EU or 10-20x in AP. On top of that there's capex and opex for that 10gb port. Assuming you've got some decent scale you're going to get 96 10gb ports in a $300,000 to $500,000 router, or $3-5,000 per 10gb port. You need ports both north and south, so you get 480gbs throughput per chassis. But you can't run above 80% util, so call it 384gbs of peak throughput. Opex for rack position, data techs, power, etc will cost $2,000 to $5,000 per month. Amortized over 36 months let's call it $10,000 to $17,000 per month all up. That 384gbs peak throughput is actually more like 128gbs averaged over the month. At 128gb/s average we transfer about 41,472,000 GB per month, or $0.00024 to $0.00041 per GB. Now double that cost 'cause routers actually come in pairs for fault tolerance. So we're paying $0.0005 to $0.0008 per GB of transit connectivity. And how many hops are there back to your application? I'd hazard around 6 by the time you go transit -> edge -> border -> core -> dc -> agg -> tor. Paying for that internal network infrastructure is going to add $0.0030 to $0.0050 to our bill. All up that gets us to $0.0128 to $0.0151 per GB transferred from our host to a third party network. Expanding the error bars lets round to $0.01 to $0.02 of network costs per GB that we deliver. To get these prices you're going to have a capital budget of tens of millions per year. OpEx would be at least $500K, or more likely a million plus, per month. If you can actually beat my pricing I'm hiring and or would like to subscribe to your news letter. Apologies if I missed something in the math. I had to do some mental acrobatics to go from dollars per gb/s to dollars per GB/month.