The cost of egress traffic is a very good reason for many organizations to not fully migrate to a cloud provider anytime soon. And since, unlike with storage costs, there doesn't seem to be an actual reason (other than: it makes migrating to competitors cost-prohibitive in a subset of cases), that seems kind of... weird?
Small example: an actual company I do some work for is in the business of delivering creative assets to distributors. This results in an egress of around 180TB per month, which is, on average just, around 500Mb/s.
So, this company currently operates 2 racks in commercial data centers, linked via 10Gb/s Ethernet-over-DWDM, with 2x512Mb/s and 1x1Gb/s Internet uplinks per DC. Each rack has 2 generic-OEM servers with ~64 AMD Zen cores, 1/2TB RAM, ~8TB NVMe and ~100TB SAS RAID6 storage per node.
Just the cost-savings over egress on AWS is enough to justify that setup, including the cost of an engineer to keep it all up and running (even though the effort required for that turns out to be minimal).
So, are cloud providers ignoring a significant market here, or is the markup on their current customers lucrative enough?
> other than: it makes migrating to competitors cost-prohibitive in a subset of cases
My theory: it forces third party services into the same cloud.
Suppose you use AWS and you want to pay a third party SaaS provider for some service involving moderate-to-large amounts of data. Here’s one of many examples:
And look at this remarkable choice: you get to pick AWS, Azure, or GCP! Snowflake is paying a lot of money to host on those clouds, and they’re passing those costs on to customers.
Snowflake is big. They have lots of engineers. They are obviously cloud-agnostic: they already support three clouds. It would surely be much cheaper to operate a physical facility, and they could plausibly offer better performance (because NVMe is amazing), and they could split the cost savings with customers. But they don’t, and my theory is that egress from customers to Snowflake would negate any cost savings, and the variable nature of the costs would scare away customers.
So my theory is that the ways that customers avoid egress fees makes the major clouds a lot of money. IMO regulators should take a very careful look at this, but it’s an excellent business decision on the parts of the clouds.
Its this plus locking customers to one cloud, because egress kills intercloud syncing on any moderately large data set. Any smart customer would have a duplicated setup across clouds if egress cost what it actually cost instead of 100x plus what it actually costs
It's pretty simple. Excessive egress costs = vendor lock in, and yes, forcing third party services into the same cloud (the walled garden), and limiting customer choice.
Just another reason so many orgs are getting heartburn from going too deep too fast into the cloud.
While I agree with what you said in general, Snowflake is a poor example. Data warehouses like Snowflake really can use the Tbps+ aggregated bandwidth between S3 and EC2 in the same region. There is no way for this to work over the Internet.
Snowflake and most other cloud services offer on-prem for these use cases, so it really doesn't make sense for them to roll their own data centers because it would be pretty niche. Cloud works for startups because they are there already, on-prem for enterprise customers with their own hardware
It's an interesting point, but I doubt it's the lions share of egress that's going to other data centers vs to customers. Fan out is where it gets expensive.
I saw a hilarious fuck up a few months ago. Company sets up an AWS hosted always on VPN solution. Connects 1000 staff through it. Celebrates how they saved $50k on the VPN solution. Gets $25k AWS bill for the just the first month of egress traffic. Turns out the data was leaving AWS egress three separate times.
If you still want to use some AWS services, you can get an AWS Direct Connect fiber cross connect from your data center rack to AWS, just like you do with your Internet connections. They operate Direct Connect in lots of third party carrier-neutral data centers. AWS egress over Direct Connect is $0.02/GB instead of $0.09/GB over the public Internet. You can serve customers through your unmetered Internet connections while accessing S3 (or whatever) via Direct Connect on the backend.
I can pay overpriced cross-connect rates in giant name brand datacenters, with or without terminating one end at Direct Connect. (AFAICT the $1600/mo or so for 10Gbps doesn’t actually cover the cost of the cross-connect.)
But that extra $65k/mo to fully utilize the link is utterly and completely nuts. My mind boggles when someone calls that a good deal. I can buy and fully depreciate the equipment needed to utilize that in a couple of days. (Well, I can’t actually buy equipment on the AWS end, but I can _rent_ it, from AWS, for a lot less money than $64k/mo.)
And I don’t believe at all that it costs AWS anything close to this much to operate the thing. I can, after all, send 10Gbps between two EC2 instances (or between S3 and EC2) for a lot less money.
That $65k is simply a punitive charge IMO. AWS wants me to avoid paying it by not doing this or, in cases where I can’t avoid it (e.g. the thing is actually a link to my office or a factory or whatever) to collect as much money as they can without driving me off AWS entirely.
i'm a customer of the GCP equivalent: partner interconnect. our DC is in an equinix facility, they wire up drops for us that layer 3 straight into GCP. unmetered 1Gbps for about 250 bucks a month per (paid to EQX not GCP). are AWS really charging you per Gb for data egress from AWS into your own DC over an AWS direct connect??
It really depends on the quality of the peering you expect. It doesn't matter, until it does. Consumer ISPs sometimes do their utmost to not peer with open exchanges, and the entire thing gets even more complex when you go to places where bandwidth is more expensive (i.e. Oceania).
There's a reason the favorite chart to exemplify value Cloudflare reps like to show is Argo Smart Routing, and why it costs about $100 per TB just like AWS and GCP.
I agree, and I would also put forward that most people don't understand what peering is or how it works. When people (usually developers who are not network engineers and have not worked at that level of the stack) talk about "egress", they mean delivering bits from your network (cloud or otherwise) to any other network on the internet. How can you put just one price on delivering a bit either to a host within the same datacenter or one on the opposite side of the planet? Physics still mean that one is more expensive than the other.
The existence of the world wide web has tricked us into thinking that sending traffic anywhere is/should be the same, but of course it is not. So while the price you (a cloud customer) pay for egress pricing is (often) indiscriminate on where that traffic is going, using common sense, we can understand that some traffic is more expensive than others, and the price we pay is a blended price with that aspect "baked in" or "priced in".
We are using Argo for our xhr search traffic as it makes more sense than setting up different servers/vms in parts of the world. Each request is only 1kb max.
But I would not use it for static assets. For this we use Bunny edge storage to provide faster response times at very reasonable prices.
Definitely lucrative enough. The use case you've described isn't particularly uncommon, but lots of companies just pay for the egress.
The problem is that there are now multiple generations of software engineers that do not know how bandwidth is priced. They've only used managed providers that charge per unit of ingress/egress, at some fractional dollar per GB.
I’ve had people refuse to believe that bandwidth is actually very cheap and cloud markup is insane (hundreds or even thousands of times cost).
I show them bare metal providers and colo that bills by size of pipe rather than transfer. They refuse to believe it or assume there must be a catch. There usually isn’t, though sometimes the very cheapest skimp on things like rich peering and can be slightly slower or less reliable. But still cheapest is relative here. Expensive bare metal or colo bandwidth is still usually hundreds of times less than big three cloud egress.
It’s just nuts.
It’s a subset of a wider problem of multiple generations of developers being fully brainwashed by “cloud native” in lots of ways. What an amazing racket this all has been for providers…
My feeling is that egress is easily measured, so it's where costs that are hard to assess get moved to.
It doesn't feel great to be line item billed for stuff at 10x the rate of credible other offers.
I think there is also some geo-specific pricing that gets hidden in a global price; bandwidth can be a lot more expensive in some locations than others and if you are charged 5x for egress in south america, nobody will use the south america locations and that's not good for business.
Right. Egress is an imperfect, but reasonable metric for overall utilization. If they started charging for CPU hertz above a certain threshold, that'd be a harder sell.
I don’t believe this. Operating an internal cloud network is expensive, but it’s expensive because of internal traffic, and they don’t charge for that internal traffic. Egress is just like traffic to any other system, and AWS doesn’t charge for that.
Also:
> It doesn't feel great to be line item billed for stuff at 10x the rate of credible other offers.
Are you a Google Cloud customer looking to exit Google Cloud? If so, you are eligible for free data transfer when you migrate all of your Google Cloud workloads and data from Google Cloud to another cloud provider or an on-premises data center.
180 TB is still a small customer in the scale of big cloud providers, so they probably just don't care. If the customers are willing to pay the price they are taking their money, if they go to one of the smaller providers they are fine with it too.
Also it could be possible to set up some hybrid solution and offload the egress heavy assets serving to another provider and only run the "brains" inside AWS/etc.
Our 20tb/m costs us $414... if you're saying that you can amortize those servers, rent the space and pay for upkeep for less than $4k a month?
We have another service that has 20x the bandwidth, but it's a legacy GAE that has super cheap premium egress... But I'm told that AWS says that their pre-pay discount will be competitive in about a year, the rate that we're growing.
The negotiated egress prices are much lower, so long as you are buying future egress. If they're not worried about you jumping ship (you use a lot of their aws-native services), you can get a great deal.
I could buy a whole off lease fully deprcriated server and a year of colo with a gig link for under $4,000, yes. I would almost certainly see better performance than any cloud provider can give me too.
The AWS Enterprise Discount Program apparently requires $1M per year spend. 180TB is about $13k on AWS so presumably not enough to be interesting to them. Hopefully someone who works at AWS can share some info.
EDP can be great if you can meet their required year over year growth requirement and if your spend is high enough to make the discounts (which are variable and negotiated often at a product offering level, not blanket) offset the required top-shelf support contract. For smaller orgs even at the $1-2M/mo level, it can often be a risk not worth taking vs other cost savings mechanisms and locating high-egress use cases elsewhere.
Egress bandwidth pricing has been the sacred cow money firehose forever, despite transit costs continuing to shrink.
Yeah, I've built several setups where total cost of ownership was lower than egress cost alone would have been on AWS. Both w/physical hardware in colos and with rented managed servers at providers like OVH and Hetzner.
Context matters here. How critical is that workload? What the economic and reputational impact for the company, if one of the physical connections or some technical problem with the data center causes a downtime of hours or days?
looking at the uptime from aws and from most big outtage notices i have read in the last few years, there does not seem to be a benefit in regards to reliability when using cloud.
see reddit, see amazon/aws outages taking with them netflix/disney plus etc
honestly its a lot better to keep your architecture cloud agnostics and test restores regulary on a different provider/region
also: store your backups somewhere else, not on your primary cloud provider, not connected to your auth system, not overwritable from anywhere
you need an oncall team be it cloud or not, taking one fte position and dedicating it to managing 2 servers(documentation/updates/backup & restore procedures testing) seems rather.. high
The article says “ Cloud providers charge for egress because it costs them money to send data out of their network. They have to pay for the infrastructure and bandwidth required to send data to users”.
The charge is not based on cost in the case of the big names. They charge an arm and a leg because they want to keep you and your data on their platform. When you move it you are breaking free.
The actual answer is much more complicated. For example, Google Cloud offers two different bandwidth tiers: premium and standard. The calculation on the OP assumes premium since that's the default option, but obviously it's much more expensive.
Google cloud's "premium" bandwidth is much akin to AWS Global Accelerator since it utilizes Google's own backbone network for as long as possible before exiting at the nearest peering point between Google and whatever ISP your end user is at. AWS Global Accelerator has some other options available, that make it fundamentally a different product, but the routing characteristics are much more similar to GCP Premium bandwidth than anything else AWS offers.
Google's "standard" bandwidth pricing is about 15%-45% cheaper than "premium", which is admittedly a significant discount, but it's still an order of magnitude more expensive than some of the other options on the list.
Nothing in your comment rejects or disproves the claim that egress costs are vendor lockdown.
Your link to the bandwidth alliance explicitly states that their justification for network costs is unloading infrastructure costs onto end users as data fees. That's their only and best justification. This is clearly a business decision that has no bearing in operational costs.
Some cloud providers charge nothing, others only start charging after hitting a high threshold from a single instance. Do they not operate infrastructure?
It's their business, it's their business model. Some restaurants charge you for a glass of tap water too. Let's not pretend they do it because of infrastructure costs.
The bandwidth alliance exists to try to cut into AWS’ business. They could always have unilaterally cut rates closer to their cost but that margin was appealing, until they realized that they were never going to catch up with AWS without being cheaper.
> For example, Google Cloud offers two different bandwidth tiers: premium and standard. The calculation on the OP assumes premium since that's the default option, but obviously it's much more expensive.
Of course, non-premium tier is v4 only, and only available at some locations.
It also forces downstream vendors that ingest a lot of data (e.g datadog, snowflake) to maintain cloud presence because their customers will not to want to pay egress fees
Let's say you pay a lot for some cloud provider and you find out that your app is best and cheapest served by a good ol' regular webhosting provider. Please, in that case, make sure you leave your money and data at independent webhosts. There's a trend going on - at least in Europe - of consolidating smaller webhosts into big players, under the guidance of some big groups (private equity?). They quickly raise their prices by 100's of percents.
I experienced this a couple of times with different webhosts (in the Netherlands) over the last three to four years. Very recently my monthly bill at one of them went up from around 3,- to around 18,-.
Whenever I read about 'egress costs' I usually laugh about that because I don't even understand it; my data is my data, why pay to get it off your hard drive!? But for some time I'm also seeing dark clouds for my own use cases. I don't find it hard to believe anymore that webhost after webhost is consolidating, trying to play AWS, upping the prices a lot, and finally... also establishing egress costs!??
Yeah wow huh. I had my wife’s food blog (wordpress) hosted at a Dutch provider called Neostrada. I think it was something like 50 euros per year at the start. They got bought, sent around emails with sleazy wording like “we’re upgrading your plan to fit our new pricing scheme” and then within ~2 years I ended up owing them 450 euros a year. I’ve never cancelled anything this quickly before.
A 9x price hike in just a few years has got to be the least scrupulous PE move I’ve ever witnessed in NL. I agree with your prediction that it’s just a matter of time before they tack on exorbitant egress fees.
If you believe that egress prices are fake and pure profit, I encourage you (or someone else reading this with the same belief) to try running your own independent web hosting service ;)
I think what you will discover is that network bandwidth is a finite resource you have to pay for and ration out to your customers, and that the easiest way to finitize and ration something your customers expect (errantly) to be infinite is to charge for it, and charge exactly that price that will cap demand!
One trick to watch out for: a cloud provider offering inexpensive egress can still make high-egress expensive by controlling the network speed of their instances. Several vendors require you to scale your whole instance if you saturate any of the components (like needing to upgrade from the 2 CPU to the 4 CPU instance to increase the network throughput, even though you don't need more CPU). On paper egress looks cheap and the instances look well priced for the hardware you get, but if you workload doesn't need balanced a balanced instance (1 CPU / 1 GB RAM / etc.) the pricing can get wonky.
The GP might be referring to how most of the non-hyperscalers like Linode or DigitalOcean or Vultr tie total monthly egress to instance size. IIRC they do allow overage charges at $x per GB but it quickly becomes more expensive to do it that way.
Oracle Cloud only charges a fraction of want Google, Microsoft, and Amazon charge. Any idea how Oracle is able to keep the cost so low? Or are the others just inflating the price so customers don’t move to the competitor? In that case Oracle deserves a shout out for not applying these vendor lock-in practices.
Oracle has probably really good margins on egress costs. With AWS/GCP/Azure the costs are absurd because for a lot of their customers it's not a big cost during operation, but makes moving data off cost prohibitive. It's simply a vendor lock-in mechanism for them.
The margin on egress is insane. Oracle got into cloud late in the game and burned a lot of goodwill downmarket so they have to sacrifice that to play catchup
Well I'm sure there are some costs, but Google charging you an arm and a leg for traffic when they literally own multiple sea cables going around the world and a bazillion datacenters seems a bit sus...
European providers benefit from lower cross-connect fees in datacenters and more internet exchanges for easy peering. It's not surprising they offer more bandwidth at the same cost.
The only downside is that Hetzner does not allow you to set a limit to control the egress traffic expenses, does it? So that you can be protected against the so called "denial-of-wallet" attacks.
The "usage" tab allows you to set a euro value limit on each project for an email warning. I just use that. It isn't specific to egress, but total accumulated usage for the project.
I had no idea it was this crazy expensive. I can host a 1 TB folder of movies on my Google Fiber internet Synology NAS website, and let my friend download it for free. But if I hosted my website on Google Cloud, they bill me $111.60? How are these cloud services getting away with this pricing?
Residential usually has some kind of hard data cap. Like if you transfer >10TB they'll just cut you off. You're also generally barred from running any kind of commercial application.
The data cap thing is generally only with comcast and other tacky low-quality hall-of-mirrors bargain-bin types of cable ISPs that don't sell proper Internet connections (maybe Cocks Cable, too?).
For example, AT&T fiber has no bandwidth caps and offers symmetric 1-10 gigabit service in an ever expanding number of areas throughout the US. I pay $55/mo for 1gbps service, and have done more than 100TB/mo for many months and it's fine.
They figure most people are hosting websites which are only a couple of MB, so they need to charge this much to be able to extract egress money from them.
Your little NAS is not directly connected to hundreds of metro areas around the globe. Even on Google Fiber, which is an excellent network, you only have a few dozen points of exchange, all in America. As a Google Cloud customer your egress traffic will be on Google's network all the way to the very edges of the world, at hundreds of interconnect points and exchanges. Your traffic will be on private networks until it is with a few miles of your end user, in all likelihood. This is a comparison between apples and diamonds.
Except they will charge you the same extortionate egress fees for outbound traffic from a single compute instance ("an apple"), no global content delivery network involved ("a diamond").
Readit News
Small example: an actual company I do some work for is in the business of delivering creative assets to distributors. This results in an egress of around 180TB per month, which is, on average just, around 500Mb/s.
So, this company currently operates 2 racks in commercial data centers, linked via 10Gb/s Ethernet-over-DWDM, with 2x512Mb/s and 1x1Gb/s Internet uplinks per DC. Each rack has 2 generic-OEM servers with ~64 AMD Zen cores, 1/2TB RAM, ~8TB NVMe and ~100TB SAS RAID6 storage per node.
Just the cost-savings over egress on AWS is enough to justify that setup, including the cost of an engineer to keep it all up and running (even though the effort required for that turns out to be minimal).
So, are cloud providers ignoring a significant market here, or is the markup on their current customers lucrative enough?
My theory: it forces third party services into the same cloud.
Suppose you use AWS and you want to pay a third party SaaS provider for some service involving moderate-to-large amounts of data. Here’s one of many examples:
https://www.snowflake.com/en/data-cloud/pricing-options/
And look at this remarkable choice: you get to pick AWS, Azure, or GCP! Snowflake is paying a lot of money to host on those clouds, and they’re passing those costs on to customers.
Snowflake is big. They have lots of engineers. They are obviously cloud-agnostic: they already support three clouds. It would surely be much cheaper to operate a physical facility, and they could plausibly offer better performance (because NVMe is amazing), and they could split the cost savings with customers. But they don’t, and my theory is that egress from customers to Snowflake would negate any cost savings, and the variable nature of the costs would scare away customers.
So my theory is that the ways that customers avoid egress fees makes the major clouds a lot of money. IMO regulators should take a very careful look at this, but it’s an excellent business decision on the parts of the clouds.
Just another reason so many orgs are getting heartburn from going too deep too fast into the cloud.
But that extra $65k/mo to fully utilize the link is utterly and completely nuts. My mind boggles when someone calls that a good deal. I can buy and fully depreciate the equipment needed to utilize that in a couple of days. (Well, I can’t actually buy equipment on the AWS end, but I can _rent_ it, from AWS, for a lot less money than $64k/mo.)
And I don’t believe at all that it costs AWS anything close to this much to operate the thing. I can, after all, send 10Gbps between two EC2 instances (or between S3 and EC2) for a lot less money.
That $65k is simply a punitive charge IMO. AWS wants me to avoid paying it by not doing this or, in cases where I can’t avoid it (e.g. the thing is actually a link to my office or a factory or whatever) to collect as much money as they can without driving me off AWS entirely.
There's a reason the favorite chart to exemplify value Cloudflare reps like to show is Argo Smart Routing, and why it costs about $100 per TB just like AWS and GCP.
The existence of the world wide web has tricked us into thinking that sending traffic anywhere is/should be the same, but of course it is not. So while the price you (a cloud customer) pay for egress pricing is (often) indiscriminate on where that traffic is going, using common sense, we can understand that some traffic is more expensive than others, and the price we pay is a blended price with that aspect "baked in" or "priced in".
But I would not use it for static assets. For this we use Bunny edge storage to provide faster response times at very reasonable prices.
The problem is that there are now multiple generations of software engineers that do not know how bandwidth is priced. They've only used managed providers that charge per unit of ingress/egress, at some fractional dollar per GB.
I show them bare metal providers and colo that bills by size of pipe rather than transfer. They refuse to believe it or assume there must be a catch. There usually isn’t, though sometimes the very cheapest skimp on things like rich peering and can be slightly slower or less reliable. But still cheapest is relative here. Expensive bare metal or colo bandwidth is still usually hundreds of times less than big three cloud egress.
It’s just nuts.
It’s a subset of a wider problem of multiple generations of developers being fully brainwashed by “cloud native” in lots of ways. What an amazing racket this all has been for providers…
It doesn't feel great to be line item billed for stuff at 10x the rate of credible other offers.
I think there is also some geo-specific pricing that gets hidden in a global price; bandwidth can be a lot more expensive in some locations than others and if you are charged 5x for egress in south america, nobody will use the south america locations and that's not good for business.
Also:
> It doesn't feel great to be line item billed for stuff at 10x the rate of credible other offers.
It’s quite a bit worse than 10x
https://cloud.google.com/exit-cloud
Also it could be possible to set up some hybrid solution and offload the egress heavy assets serving to another provider and only run the "brains" inside AWS/etc.
What's cheaper with cloud is that you don't need upfront costs, but here, you already have the whole infrastructure already there, up and running.
Why would you even consider getting rid of it and replacing it with AWS, makes no sense.
(You're wrong, there are many such scenarios)
We have another service that has 20x the bandwidth, but it's a legacy GAE that has super cheap premium egress... But I'm told that AWS says that their pre-pay discount will be competitive in about a year, the rate that we're growing.
The negotiated egress prices are much lower, so long as you are buying future egress. If they're not worried about you jumping ship (you use a lot of their aws-native services), you can get a great deal.
Shouldn't it be the other way around? Why are they giving you are discount if you're not likely to jump?
Aka as long as you are not using the cloud as cloud the cloud can be cheap?
>rent the space and pay for upkeep for less than $4k a month?
I mean, you can just rent servers somewhere else.. or do a colocation rack. Also I would strongly suggest going with the first one
Egress bandwidth pricing has been the sacred cow money firehose forever, despite transit costs continuing to shrink.
see reddit, see amazon/aws outages taking with them netflix/disney plus etc
honestly its a lot better to keep your architecture cloud agnostics and test restores regulary on a different provider/region
also: store your backups somewhere else, not on your primary cloud provider, not connected to your auth system, not overwritable from anywhere
Deleted Comment
The charge is not based on cost in the case of the big names. They charge an arm and a leg because they want to keep you and your data on their platform. When you move it you are breaking free.
Hence the high costs to deter this behavior.
This isn't remotely true.
The bandwidth alliance exists, and a lot of cloud companies are on the list: https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/bandwidth-alliance/
The actual answer is much more complicated. For example, Google Cloud offers two different bandwidth tiers: premium and standard. The calculation on the OP assumes premium since that's the default option, but obviously it's much more expensive.
Google cloud's "premium" bandwidth is much akin to AWS Global Accelerator since it utilizes Google's own backbone network for as long as possible before exiting at the nearest peering point between Google and whatever ISP your end user is at. AWS Global Accelerator has some other options available, that make it fundamentally a different product, but the routing characteristics are much more similar to GCP Premium bandwidth than anything else AWS offers.
This is why egress is dirt cheap on other platforms outside the big 3 cloud providers.
This is also why ingress is free.
Nothing in your comment rejects or disproves the claim that egress costs are vendor lockdown.
Your link to the bandwidth alliance explicitly states that their justification for network costs is unloading infrastructure costs onto end users as data fees. That's their only and best justification. This is clearly a business decision that has no bearing in operational costs.
Some cloud providers charge nothing, others only start charging after hitting a high threshold from a single instance. Do they not operate infrastructure?
It's their business, it's their business model. Some restaurants charge you for a glass of tap water too. Let's not pretend they do it because of infrastructure costs.
Of course, non-premium tier is v4 only, and only available at some locations.
I experienced this a couple of times with different webhosts (in the Netherlands) over the last three to four years. Very recently my monthly bill at one of them went up from around 3,- to around 18,-.
Whenever I read about 'egress costs' I usually laugh about that because I don't even understand it; my data is my data, why pay to get it off your hard drive!? But for some time I'm also seeing dark clouds for my own use cases. I don't find it hard to believe anymore that webhost after webhost is consolidating, trying to play AWS, upping the prices a lot, and finally... also establishing egress costs!??
A 9x price hike in just a few years has got to be the least scrupulous PE move I’ve ever witnessed in NL. I agree with your prediction that it’s just a matter of time before they tack on exorbitant egress fees.
I think what you will discover is that network bandwidth is a finite resource you have to pay for and ration out to your customers, and that the easiest way to finitize and ration something your customers expect (errantly) to be infinite is to charge for it, and charge exactly that price that will cap demand!
Interesting. Which cloud providers do you have in mind?
Oracle has probably really good margins on egress costs. With AWS/GCP/Azure the costs are absurd because for a lot of their customers it's not a big cost during operation, but makes moving data off cost prohibitive. It's simply a vendor lock-in mechanism for them.
As a data company we really benefit from Scaleway, Hetzner and Ovh.
However, Scale way has no plans to add an US infra
And I don't know if Hetzner has US présence?
It's not like AWS or GCP have locations that are terribly far from major exchanges either.
Except you paid the cost for the fiber connection. You also get one more 9 of reliability from their DC.
For example, AT&T fiber has no bandwidth caps and offers symmetric 1-10 gigabit service in an ever expanding number of areas throughout the US. I pay $55/mo for 1gbps service, and have done more than 100TB/mo for many months and it's fine.