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.
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.
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.
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;
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)
My suspicion is they would shut you down, or encourage you to move to a larger droplet. As is referenced by glomph later in this thread, their TOU states "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;"
Consistently using excessive bandwidth likely falls in the "unreasonable or disproportionately large load " category. And, regardless, $5 for 1 Terabyte is only $0.005/gigabyte, which can only be offered, as long as people don't actually use 1 Terabyte of bandwidth The cheapest price Amazon offers (after discounts) is $0.08/gigabyte, after 150 terabytes which you've paid them $12,800 for.
In comparison, if we were to take Digital Ocean at Face Value, we could get that same 150 Terabytes for $150 * 5 or $750.
Do you truly believe that Digital Ocean is able to offer bandwidth at such a Discount to Amazon? Particularly when the price Schedule for Amazon in Singapore is graduated as follows:
First 1 GB / month $0.000 per GB
Up to 10 TB / month $0.120 per GB
Next 40 TB / month $0.085 per GB
Next 100 TB / month $0.082 per GB
Next 350 TB / month $0.080 per GB
You get a sense that their is a structural price floor around $0.08/GB that is hard for them to sell bandwidth for less.
The point I'm trying to make, and hopefully succeeding at, is DO and Amazon are in different business models. DO is profitable as long as the majority of their customers don't use the services intensively. Amazon, on the other hand, is profitable regardless of how much of their services you use - as a result, each of the companies incentives regarding account termination, and rate limiting, will likewise be aligned.
Please note, of course, that I'm saying this as a thoroughly satisfied Digital Ocean Customer. I've ceased using Amazon EC2 for pretty much everything, and have DO droplets all around the world. I love their service, and an am extraordinarily satisfied with both the performance and quality of their offering.
If you've ever bought bandwidth at a colo you know the AWS rates have extremely high margins. I'd wager that DO can afford it, it just eats at their margins.
I have a DO VM that I use for a few hobby apps but mostly for a Tor relay. $10/mo plan. I've done my best to throttle the bandwidth usage within the plan bounds but can't say for sure whether or not I've been entirely successful at that. Nevertheless -> zero fuss from DO, nothing, not a single complaint or $.01 added to my bill. I don't think I (or the Tor user community) would have fared nearly was well with Amazon.
0.02 cents and $0.02 are two different things. I was confused by your reply. See [1] for a very frustrating example where Verizon reps made the same mistake.
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)
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.
(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.)