8 ms·

AWS Data Transfer Price Reduction

50 points by sah88 12y ago

djcapelis 12y ago
It's great to see Amazon continue to push down bandwidth charges when they manage to get prices down. Bandwidth pricing can be incredibly expensive in some parts of the world. With AWS you basically get to take advantage of Amazon's negotiating team and clout while still being able to put nodes near the end-points. (Basically bandwidth in Australia is ridiculously expensive and if you wanted to serve that continent it'd be a big headache, but now you can just spin up a machine on EC2 in that region and use Amazon's prices.)
davidmat 12y ago
Strong incentive to dive in to CloudFront CDN it seems. Transfer from AWS to CloudFront 'edge' caches is now free, and outgoing from CloudFront to the internet is nearly 30% cheaper all of a sudden.
- donavanm 12y ago
  cloudFront has been cheaper than S3 for as long as I can recall. And it makes sense with the way amazon does cost based pricing. Its cheaper to transfer cached bits fromthe edge of the network than pull it from inside of multiple datacenters.
ghshephard 12y ago
The thing I love about pricing from organizations like Amazon, is that there is zero pressure, incentive, or intent on their part to curb you from using their resources, or finding you in any way in violation of some implicit "Fair Use" restrictions. For example, in Singapore, Bandwidth from EC2 to the Internet is $0.120 per GB for the first 10 TB. So, if I have a site that sends out 2 TB of data, my bandwidth charges are $240/month, and Amazon is 100% fine with me doing that every month, and I should have zero concern about any type of rate limiting, or restrictions. On the other hand, Digital Ocean (who I do have a VPS with in Singapore) charges me $10/month for a VPS with 2 TB/Transfer. I have no idea what they would do if I actually started using all 2 TB every month, but I can't believe it would end well. I'm curious though - has anyone played around with using the cheap bandwidth of these VPSs to do a "roll your own" CDN? I.E. for $500/month you could purchase 100 Digital Ocean VPS @$5/month and, in theory get 100 * 1 Terabyte, or 100 Terabytes of transfer to the internet a month. I'm pretty sure Digital Ocean would frown on that, but I'm interested in whether anyone has done the obvious thing and tried.
- sschueller 12y ago
  Linode is very clear, you get a certain pool amount and if you go over it is $0.10 for each GB over.
  - ghshephard 12y ago
    That is very reasonable. With DigitalOcean, All I could find was: "Policy Do you charge for bandwidth? Yes. Plans start with 1TB per month and increase incrementally. Once the monthly transfer limit has been exceeded, the cost of bandwidth is $0.02 per GB over the limit." I'm sure they have restrictions somewhere on "pooling droplets" in getting around the $0.02/per GB limit (which is already very reasonable - I wonder how they feel about customers that make a lot of use of that $0.02/GB? Amazon, even when you get to the 5 PB/month tier, still charges $.06/GB in the Singapore Region)
- simoncion 12y ago
  > On the other hand, Digital Ocean ... charges me $10/month for a VPS with 2 TB/Transfer. I have no idea what they would do if I actually started using all 2 TB every month... What does your contract say? If you don't have a contract, then -because they're a US company- you go by the advertising, and take them to court if they don't deliver what they promised.
  - glomph 12y ago
    Here is the relevant point in their ToS: 3.3 You shall not: (i) take any action that imposes or may impose (as determined by us in our sole discretion) an unreasonable or disproportionately large load on our (or our third party providers’) infrastructure;
- jokergd 12y ago
  Regarding DigitalOcean -- they would NOT frown on it if you go over your usage, you are charged 0.02 cents per gigabyte over your limit if you stay within your usage, nothing happens (note, as of right now, there is no charges for overages. until your bandwidth transfer stats are available on the control panel, there will be no overage charges)
_stephan 12y ago
I'm curious how much margin there still is in the bandwidth charges of the big cloud providers. Hetzner only charges 1.39 € per extra TB (and the first 30 TB (!) are free), though the bandwidth quality probably isn't comparable. http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/news/trafficpreis-dauerhaft-reduziert http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/news/trafficpreis-dauerhaft...
mackwic 12y ago
I really don't understand this thing about charging bandwidth. In France we are used to the free and unlimited bandwidth for all providers and hosters (see OVH, Gandi, Dedibox... but also all ISP), and the rare cases when I had to pay my bandwidth (Hertzner), the service was quite bad (routes issues, ipv6 issues, and the throughput was very inconsistent). It really seems to me like some providers are trying to charge for anything in order to extract value.
- ghshephard 12y ago
  TANSTAAFL
wbond 12y ago
AWS and most other cloud providers have prohibitively expensive bandwidth compared to Linode's bundled bandwidth. With Linode you get a free server to boot! Just yesterday I compared a VM with 8gb ram moving 4.4TB of data. With Linode you get 8TB for $80 a month. Yesterday AWS was $630 for the same server and the 4.4TB of bandwidth. For that price on Linode you can get 4 16gb servers, totaling 32 cores and 64TB of bandwidth. Even with the just announced AWS price reduction, it is still extremely expensive. If you move a lot of bandwidth, check out Linode.
- freshflowers 12y ago
  It irks me that every time AWS comes up people compare the pricing with simple VPS providers that only sell virtual machines and a few bells and whistles. For starters, users that burn a lot of bandwidth probably don't do it by serving files from a VPS in a single location. In an AWS context, they may be using S3, Cloudfront and all the features and services that come with it. Setting all of that up on DIY VPS boxes (and maintaining it) may be fun for a hobby, but in business that's all costs. The cost of bandwidth is a trivial footnote. Saying Linode's bandwidth is cheaper is like saying steak is cheaper at the butcher than it is at a restaurant.
  - virtuallynathan 12y ago
    That may be true, but try building a CDN on top of AWS and you'll be out of cash pretty quickly with their bandwidth prices.
    - emidln 12y ago
      It seems like a bad strategic decision to try to build a CDN on top of a platform that already offers a CDN while expecting to be cheaper than their economy-of-scale-driven CDN. Not to say that you couldn't build a CDN on AWS, but if you're going to do it, wanting to do it for cheaper than someone who doesn't pay markup on the same instances (Amazon) isn't realistic.
      - 12y ago

50 points by sah88 12y ago

It's great to see Amazon continue to push down bandwidth charges when they manage to get prices down. Bandwidth pricing can be incredibly expensive in some parts of the world. With AWS you basically get to take advantage of Amazon's negotiating team and clout while still being able to put nodes near the end-points. (Basically bandwidth in Australia is ridiculously expensive and if you wanted to serve that continent it'd be a big headache, but now you can just spin up a machine on EC2 in that region and use Amazon's prices.)

davidmat 12y ago

Strong incentive to dive in to CloudFront CDN it seems. Transfer from AWS to CloudFront 'edge' caches is now free, and outgoing from CloudFront to the internet is nearly 30% cheaper all of a sudden.

donavanm 12y ago
cloudFront has been cheaper than S3 for as long as I can recall. And it makes sense with the way amazon does cost based pricing. Its cheaper to transfer cached bits fromthe edge of the network than pull it from inside of multiple datacenters.

ghshephard 12y ago

The thing I love about pricing from organizations like Amazon, is that there is zero pressure, incentive, or intent on their part to curb you from using their resources, or finding you in any way in violation of some implicit "Fair Use" restrictions. For example, in Singapore, Bandwidth from EC2 to the Internet is $0.120 per GB for the first 10 TB. So, if I have a site that sends out 2 TB of data, my bandwidth charges are $240/month, and Amazon is 100% fine with me doing that every month, and I should have zero concern about any type of rate limiting, or restrictions. On the other hand, Digital Ocean (who I do have a VPS with in Singapore) charges me $10/month for a VPS with 2 TB/Transfer. I have no idea what they would do if I actually started using all 2 TB every month, but I can't believe it would end well. I'm curious though - has anyone played around with using the cheap bandwidth of these VPSs to do a "roll your own" CDN? I.E. for $500/month you could purchase 100 Digital Ocean VPS @$5/month and, in theory get 100 * 1 Terabyte, or 100 Terabytes of transfer to the internet a month. I'm pretty sure Digital Ocean would frown on that, but I'm interested in whether anyone has done the obvious thing and tried.

sschueller 12y ago
Linode is very clear, you get a certain pool amount and if you go over it is $0.10 for each GB over.
- ghshephard 12y ago
  That is very reasonable. With DigitalOcean, All I could find was: "Policy Do you charge for bandwidth? Yes. Plans start with 1TB per month and increase incrementally. Once the monthly transfer limit has been exceeded, the cost of bandwidth is $0.02 per GB over the limit." I'm sure they have restrictions somewhere on "pooling droplets" in getting around the $0.02/per GB limit (which is already very reasonable - I wonder how they feel about customers that make a lot of use of that $0.02/GB? Amazon, even when you get to the 5 PB/month tier, still charges $.06/GB in the Singapore Region)
simoncion 12y ago
> On the other hand, Digital Ocean ... charges me $10/month for a VPS with 2 TB/Transfer. I have no idea what they would do if I actually started using all 2 TB every month... What does your contract say? If you don't have a contract, then -because they're a US company- you go by the advertising, and take them to court if they don't deliver what they promised.
- glomph 12y ago
  Here is the relevant point in their ToS: 3.3 You shall not: (i) take any action that imposes or may impose (as determined by us in our sole discretion) an unreasonable or disproportionately large load on our (or our third party providers’) infrastructure;
jokergd 12y ago
Regarding DigitalOcean -- they would NOT frown on it if you go over your usage, you are charged 0.02 cents per gigabyte over your limit if you stay within your usage, nothing happens (note, as of right now, there is no charges for overages. until your bandwidth transfer stats are available on the control panel, there will be no overage charges)

_stephan 12y ago

I'm curious how much margin there still is in the bandwidth charges of the big cloud providers. Hetzner only charges 1.39 € per extra TB (and the first 30 TB (!) are free), though the bandwidth quality probably isn't comparable. http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/news/trafficpreis-dauerhaft-reduziert http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/news/trafficpreis-dauerhaft...

mackwic 12y ago

I really don't understand this thing about charging bandwidth. In France we are used to the free and unlimited bandwidth for all providers and hosters (see OVH, Gandi, Dedibox... but also all ISP), and the rare cases when I had to pay my bandwidth (Hertzner), the service was quite bad (routes issues, ipv6 issues, and the throughput was very inconsistent). It really seems to me like some providers are trying to charge for anything in order to extract value.

ghshephard 12y ago
TANSTAAFL

wbond 12y ago

AWS and most other cloud providers have prohibitively expensive bandwidth compared to Linode's bundled bandwidth. With Linode you get a free server to boot! Just yesterday I compared a VM with 8gb ram moving 4.4TB of data. With Linode you get 8TB for $80 a month. Yesterday AWS was $630 for the same server and the 4.4TB of bandwidth. For that price on Linode you can get 4 16gb servers, totaling 32 cores and 64TB of bandwidth. Even with the just announced AWS price reduction, it is still extremely expensive. If you move a lot of bandwidth, check out Linode.

freshflowers 12y ago
It irks me that every time AWS comes up people compare the pricing with simple VPS providers that only sell virtual machines and a few bells and whistles. For starters, users that burn a lot of bandwidth probably don't do it by serving files from a VPS in a single location. In an AWS context, they may be using S3, Cloudfront and all the features and services that come with it. Setting all of that up on DIY VPS boxes (and maintaining it) may be fun for a hobby, but in business that's all costs. The cost of bandwidth is a trivial footnote. Saying Linode's bandwidth is cheaper is like saying steak is cheaper at the butcher than it is at a restaurant.
- virtuallynathan 12y ago
  That may be true, but try building a CDN on top of AWS and you'll be out of cash pretty quickly with their bandwidth prices.
  - emidln 12y ago
    It seems like a bad strategic decision to try to build a CDN on top of a platform that already offers a CDN while expecting to be cheaper than their economy-of-scale-driven CDN. Not to say that you couldn't build a CDN on AWS, but if you're going to do it, wanting to do it for cheaper than someone who doesn't pay markup on the same instances (Amazon) isn't realistic.
    - 12y ago