I've known about this for a while, but never bothered to ask. Why is that kind of fee even legal? Is there anything pro-social or valuable about that kind of business practice?
Companies are free to impose whatever fees they want. You can simply just choose to not have business relationships with them. Monopolies complicate the question, but AWS is not a monopoly.
Yes, AWS’s customers knew what they were signing up for, but AWS’s competitors and potential competitors have a right to enter the market and compete with AWS, and they can’t do that effectively if AWS is hoarding all the customers with punitive switching fees.
S3 egress rates do not prevent you from switching. Transferring out data costs about the same as 3 months of regular storage.
> AWS is hoarding all the customers with punitive switching fees.
The fees are not punitive. The Internet egress fees are similar to inter-region transfer fees within AWS itself.
AWS and all the clouds are too big. They structure prices to milk the most of their captured customers. They all price their products within parity, so on the whole there isn't a huge difference in moving. This also makes a nice natural churn between them. The clouds themselves offer almost no innovation in the computing space.
You know who the real rubes are? Everyone else, chip manufacturers, storage, etc. They all made commodity things using shared protocols and people are just pissing it away. And this sht replacing everything is worse than the stuff getting recycled, hardware, ideas, all of it.
Well, yes. I support regulation when it makes sense, but this situation isn't it.
> They structure prices to milk the most of their captured customers. They all price their products within parity, so on the whole there isn't a huge difference in moving.
You've got to make your money somehow. And expense structures for various large providers are pretty similar, there's no shady conspiracy here.
The law says that since the fee was clearly communicated to you and you had a choice to use the service or not, there's nothing wrong with that.
Maybe in libertarian paradise, but this line gets parroted a lot for something so patently untrue. Even in the US there are plenty of laws that rightfully limit the freedom of vendors for the benefit of consumers.
Wrong. You seem to be unaware of the whole concept of anti-competitive behavior.
This is their "normal" egress fee. Maybe too high, but it's not a "gotcha" that applies just to migrating away.
Almost all cloud providers cost you for egress fee or have some limitations on egress, except Cloudflare.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/
https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/aws-morning-brief/how-...
Also to note that on many smaller VPS providers customers rightfully pay for the bandwidth, not total traffic. So this charging-by-traffic appears to have no other explanation than predatory practices.
It's almost certainly done on purpose to discourage you from switching away, and in the hopes that you won't notice until you deleted all other copies of your data.
Like who is charging the amount? Is it all aws or is there a cloudflare portion? Part of it is paying an engineer's time? How much data is being transferred?
If it was pure egress fees then it's roughly ~350tb of data?
Four grand. It can be done cheaper over time.