In a blog post this week, Cloudflare complained that Amazon AWS’s egress fees are too high. According to CF’s calculations, customers are paying:
- 80 times Amazon’s costs in the US, Canada, and Europe
- 21 times Amazon’s costs in South America
- Between 3.5 times and 17 times Amazon’s costs in Asia
As they put it, “Amazon stands alone in not passing on savings” and notes that Amazon AWS has declined to be part of the Bandwidth Alliance, in which major providers substantially discount egress charges between mutual Cloudflare customers.
Industry-wide, over the last 10 years, wholesale bandwidth costs are 93% cheaper than they were in 2011. However, Amazon AWS’s costs is only 25% cheaper.
There’s a lot more analysis in the post, which is a very interesting read and emphasizes the point that big cloud players are not the right fit for all users. Paying per-gigabyte for network traffic is enormously expensive and in many cases, buying a VM package with bundled bandwidth is more cost-effective.
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raindog308 is a longtime community LETizen, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.
As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, raindog308 runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.
Beyond the command line, raindog308 has a life-long love of German Shepherd Dogs, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, playing guitar, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.
His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.
You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.
Jeff Bozo (has) had to build up revenue for his rocket ship and also keep investors happy:) The space game is expensive…
correct answer.