Hacker News Reader

Comment by fpgaminer | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. I've heard some people say that those prices are kept high to encourage keeping data locked within the platform; forcing people to use the provider's services versus shipping data off to other platforms. I'm not sure if I believe that or not, but it's an interesting theory.

Honestly, the high bandwidth costs have killed a number of ideas I would have liked to tinker with on AWS. I find the cost of EC2 to be quite good, and storage cost is tolerable, but $.10/GB of bandwidth-out is horrific.

View on HN

Seriously, I pay $20 for a VPS with good stats and 3TB of outbound bandwidth per month. It's with Linode, who have been apparently hard hit, but I've suffered about 10 minutes of downtime over the course of the last 2 years, and all of that was in the past week, when the DDOS crap started. Since then it's been fine.

Apart from the breach and global password resets today.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/cloud-firm-linode-resets-user-p...

I have been a big fan of linode in the past, I still have a fair amount with them but honestly at this point I'm seriously considering AWS even at the increased cost (which compared to my time isn't that large really and reputational cost which is).

This is the third time they've had a critical breach in the past 5 or so years, and that's excluding all the DDoS downtime they've had in that time span. I stopped using them after their second breach, and frankly am glad I did. I'm very happy with Digital Ocean.

I just wish DO hardware has a bit faster (or not so over-subscribed?). All of our tests show Linode beat DO hands down for at similar price points.

True. But DO seems to have more downtimes. I have had several scheduled forced reboots, some network downtime and just plain outages.

I've only had one in the past year I've been using them.

Wow. Disappointing that I found out about this here, 7 hours after it was posted, before hearing anything from Linode.

I was a Linode customer back when it first happened.

I found out on Slashdot/Reddit first and got the email from Linode about 3 days later. I have known ever since then that Linode is the type of provider you don't want to be involved with. A VPS provider has one responsibility above all else: be honest and transparent.

Yes, with Linode and other VPS providers we get good amount of bandwidth quota. Also if you have 2 instances running then they combine the monthly quota for you. But, how much network capacity one can use is actually limited by the network connectivity the machine offers.

For example, the $20 a month VPS on Linode offers only 250 Mbps connectivity (outgoing bandwidth). So as soon as you saturate that, you need one more VPS to handle the load. So this leaves a lot of bandwidth quota unused. Especially since in the real world traffic tends to come in spikes. AWS is similar, depending on the instance size the network connectivity differs. This makes the calculations for estimating costs for hosting even more difficult.

yeah, but 250 Mbps will chew up your bandwidth quota in a day or 2... so you already needed more quota anyways... unless your traffic is incredibly spiky.

Common misconception. The prices are highly negotiable. Nobody with significant traffic is paying anything close to book rates.

What do you consider significant? If you are doing over 10TB then you'll be paying lower and even lower the higher you go. This doesn't help the smaller players doing under 10TB. Do you know of people under 10TB that have negotiated better rates?

I don't consider $900/month in bandwidth significant. And I'm sure Amazon account managers don't either -- but it can't hurt to ask, especially if you've got a growth plan that makes sense.

10TB is about $50 worth of high quality bandwidth. I'm glad you don't mind paying an extra $10k a year for that.

Right now I use 3 Softlayer virtual servers to serve up 15TB of static files a month. It costs me a whopping $168 a month. The same 15TB on AWS would cost $1325 a month. I consider saving $1157 'significant'.

Softlayer no longer includes 5TB on every virtual server and their bandwidth is equally outrageous so I'm still evaluating a plan for new servers.

At that point you're rapidly approaching the scale where cloud-style on-demand provisioning isn't really helping you (unless you prefer AWS's tooling to any "private cloud", which is legit), and you might as well put a bunch of dedicated servers in colo, right?

That is to say, the reason you can negotiate a discount once you get well past that point (or if you intend to grow well past that point) is because staying on AWS makes increasingly less sense for you.

Depends on the situation - a bunch of dedicated servers means a sizable shift from "operating expenses" like AWS fees to "capital expenses" for hardware. It also means shifting expenses from monthly as-you-go to mostly upfront.

Finding a provider that leases dedicated servers to you for a monthly fee isn't exactly hard.

> a bunch of dedicated servers means a sizable shift from "operating expenses" like AWS fees to "capital expenses" for hardware.

Not anymore. In the US, you can now write off $500K/year in equipment costs immediately.

> It also means shifting expenses from monthly as-you-go to mostly upfront.

Dedicated server provider or lease the equipment instead of buy.

Network egress costs on AWS appear to be a factor of 10x more than dedicated servers. Google GCE is pretty much the same.

That is a lot of negotiation that needs to be done. Will they get anywhere close to that kind of discount?

How big a customer do you need to be?

Keep in mind that if you're sufficiently large, you can negotiate better rates on dedi as well. Because of the massive competition in that market, you don't have to be that large to do it either.

Reading between the lines, I think AWS has a huge upstream bandwidth bottleneck that it can't get around easily, while spread out small dedi providers have everything but this problem.

(Speculation based on how AWS prices things: Build big, charge for everything, charge what it actually costs with a small markup, and put every high-margin provider out of business)

This isn't the case. (speaking from knowledge)

Definitely not so. AWS is the most profitable part of AMZN. They are printing money on the markup on egress.

Transparent pricing is one of the greatest selling points of the "cloud". Nobody in the startup scene wants to deal with traditional enterprisey "call us for a quote" pricing unless they really have no other choice.

So if what you're saying is right, that would be just another reason for most small companies to avoid Amazon. If you're wrong, other comments in this thread have also given a good reason for small companies to avoid Amazon.

Huh? It's totally transparent AND you can get a better deal if you pick up the phone and negotiate. They'll ask you to sign a commitment and (unenforceable) exclusivity clause.

Some people even take that "confidential" offer letter for volume pricing and shop it around to other cloud providers. Shocker!

I have trouble believing that this is actually true. I say this as a customer who spends a half million a month with AWS (and that spending is rapidly increasing).

There are some growth incentives (eg, prepay $3MM for next year, get 6% off all services), and there are some tiered savings (e.g. 5% off on more than $500k of RIs in a single region), but I've never seen a plausible, verifiable incident of people successfully negotiating AWS rates downward.

Do you have any evidence of this at all?

"You agree that the existence and terms of this Addendum and the Private Pricing Program are not publicly known and constitute AWS Confidential Information under the Agreement."

Maybe they're milking your investors. Maybe you've built some absurd contraption that they know you won't be able to move elsewhere. Or maybe you need to hire a better negotiator.

That text matches what we got from a growth commitment that included a pretty modest discount.

Given that we couldn't get it; and that nobody from our company's entire VC network could get it; and that nobody on my CTO email list could get it... I'm going to continue thinking that the anonymous HN commenter is talking out of his ass.

But if you can prove me wrong, I'd be thrilled to be wrong.

"the anonymous HN commenter is talking out of his ass"

Anonymous commenter versus 11-hour old throwaway account... who wins?

Looking at a few words in your rebuttal above and combining it with the tone you're using, I can come up with quite a few reasons you might not have gotten the discount you sought.

I'd suggest you put down the "CTO email list" and let an actual business person handle this for you. Handshakes and existing relationships still matter in this world. Good luck!

If you're going to complain about tone; don't be a rude son of a bitch in the first place.

That said, no point in arguing further with a liar and/or troll. You're not getting 10x discounts on your AWS bill. You're not fooling me or anybody else.

I can't even get my head around paying $500,000/month--for anything. I'm really out of this new economy.

What would use this much computing power, besides bitcoin mining, or popular top 100 site? Maybe an online game? Just curious.

You don't think any traditional economy companies pay $500k a month for anything? How much do you think airlines spend on fuel a month for example?

Do people really think AWS got to be a 10 billion dollar business by hosting node.js to garage door opener gateways?

When situations like this come up I always suggest people read the history of Western Electric. Talk about scale!

The median AWS based SaaS company spends around 6% of their revenue on AWS. (this compares to a median of 7% for those who choose to manage their own servers).

As such, $500k/mo isn't a terribly elite club. Essentially every SaaS company that does more than $10MM/mo of revenue is spending as much or more than we are.

True. We pay 10% more due to the support plan. ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com