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.)
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.
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.
This is an unfair comparison. Like others have mentioned in this thread they have subtle items in their terms and conditions that prevent you from actually using all that bandwidth 100% month by month. They can offer these prices by overselling their bandwidth.
You can move a lot of bandwidth for sure but as soon as you start using droplets or linodes for the sole intent of using its' included bandwidth (to self-build a CDN on it for example) you'll be shut down in no time.
Bandwidth on EC2 VMs is crazily expensive, especially when you add the fact that you need to use the most expensive instances to get decent speeds.
On the other hand, if you have some heavy static files to serve, the scalability of S3 is hard to beat. It can serve the files more reliably than anything you can come up with.
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.
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] djcapelis|11 years ago|reply
(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.)
[+] [-] wbond|11 years ago|reply
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|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] admiun|11 years ago|reply
You can move a lot of bandwidth for sure but as soon as you start using droplets or linodes for the sole intent of using its' included bandwidth (to self-build a CDN on it for example) you'll be shut down in no time.
[+] [-] tobltobs|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Wilya|11 years ago|reply
On the other hand, if you have some heavy static files to serve, the scalability of S3 is hard to beat. It can serve the files more reliably than anything you can come up with.
[+] [-] ghshephard|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] simoncion|11 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jokergd|11 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] sschueller|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adhipg|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _stephan|11 years ago|reply
http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/news/trafficpreis-dauerhaft...
[+] [-] davidmat|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] donavanm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mackwic|11 years ago|reply
It really seems to me like some providers are trying to charge for anything in order to extract value.
[+] [-] ghshephard|11 years ago|reply