Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

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Does anyone know what the actual margin on outbound data / egress is?

S3 is charging $0.023 per GB, right?

IIUC - there's not a fixed cost for sending 1 GB of data. The cost differs based on where you send from and send to. So it'd be hard to have a really good estimate - but I'm wondering if anyone has a good ballpark figure.

My understanding is that transferring data on the same continent (vast majority of traffic) should be <$0.0005 - meaning the margin is really high.

I know it's more in Amazon's interest for your cloud usage to be as inefficient as possible - so they can charge you as much as possible and get as much margin as possible.

However, this product doesn't seem to make sense to me.

Why would you even pick your S3 regions? Shouldn't AWS balance your data for you across continents so that your data egress is automatically optimized?

Is that how Cloudflare works?

Amazon egress changes depends on the region of the s3 data location.

Bandwith cost highly depends on the scale and target network. Cloudflare has a good blogpost on relative bandwith cost: https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world...

To put numbers to the relativity, for a somewhat smaller datacenter in Central Europe with a 100Gbit/s connection, the running Cost of transit is somewhere around 0.00004€ per GB, on a theoretically fully sustained connection(not realistic, also with no redundancy or hardware). Peering is basically free(after initial buildout) with around 3k€ per 100Gbit/s (https://www.ams-ix.net/ams/pricing). This all excludes cost of investment for initial buildout and hardware. On a scale on amazons level this becomes even cheaper, since operating your own network is cheaper than buying transit.

Hetzner charges 1,19€ per TB, amazon 90$(on the first 10 TB). So amazon probably doesnt really care about the price differences per region and went with a mixed calculation, since their margins are so absurdly huge.

also, major parts of the cost are in hardware and staffing/development, of which amazon has way more, due to the demands of SDN.

That $0.023 per GB is for storage. It's $0.09 per GB for egress (varies by region). It's charged the same as all other egress from AWS.

I run pixeldrain.com which uses a lot of bandwidth. The website uses about 6 PB per month and I'm paying €3000 for that, so that's about €0.50 per TB

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