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Comment by refulgentis | Hacker News Reader

I get the "lol aws is owned" angle but it beggars belief that a petabyte of data transfer only costs $0.13. This is clearly unsustainable and we'll have to find out later what the hidden cost is

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My long term understanding from Cloudflare blog posts is that network activity is actually incredibly cheap, moreso when you own a ton of the underlying infra.

Thing is, all cloud providers do own the pipes, so they just rent-seek on egress pricing. Cloudflare is disrupting that model.

This is correct. And largely a fixed rather than variable cost for us.

^^^ The CEO of Cloudflare.

You’ve very likely forced Amazon’s hand here wrt egress pricing, and yet this move alone has won my business even if everything else was equal. Bravo.

Do you have any mention on the speed of delivery from R2?

That is the only avenue why I can see why paying for S3 is worth it. Sure egress may be free, but what's the point if I can't download a file faster than 1MB/s.

Network and bandwidth are absolutely not free but certainly not that expensive as the three major public clouds are charging: $0.1 per GB equals to $100 per 1TB transfer.

Linode, Digital Ocean and other hosting companies sell small VPSs with 4TB bandwidth for $10/month and still making profit. At places like OVH, Hetzner bandwith is virtually unlimited.

That is 1/250 the bandwidth for 60x the price, no?

One caveat for the VPS business model is they're almost certainly relying on the fact that most users don't use all their allocation and overprovisioning. Whereas something pay as you go like s3 or r2 is going to have users paid for volume equalling their used volume.

Linode, Digital Ocean, OVH, Hetzner all have hourly billing.

Sure, they have this model for CPU time, but not for network bandwidth. If your monthly allocation is 4TB and you use it for one day, you have 4TB / 30 bandwidth in that day. If you go over it they reserve the right to cut you off, if you go significantly under it, they don't discount you.

The average Linode customer is not using 136GB of bandwidth per host per day.

You can see what egress costs companies in this Cloudflare blog post - TLDR they pay for the size of the hose, not the amount of water flowing through it https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/

The other TL;DR is that AWS's markup on bandwidth for US/Canada is 80x.

Exactly. Those of us who spent time in the data center and network world had some adjustment to go through when we first encountered the cloud bandwidth billing model. It hasn’t aged particularly well either.

Which is why so many never left that world. e.g. I run my k8s clusters on dedicated Hetzner machines to avoid this entire pricing model. Even accounting for devops time it’s cheaper than AWS, GCP or Azure.

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