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Comment by andersa | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how AWS can keep ripping people off with these absurd data transfer fees, when there is Cloudflare R2 just right over there offering a 100 times better deal.

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Data has "gravity" -- as in, it holds you down to where your data is, and you have to spend money to move it just like you have to spend money to escape gravity.

When all my VMs and containers are hosted in AWS, and S3 has rock solid support no matter what language, framework, setup I use, it becomes really tough to ask the team to use another vendor for object storage. If something goes wrong with R2 (data loss, slow transfer, etc.) I will get blamed (or at least asked for help). If S3 loses data or performs slowly in some case, people will just figure we're somehow using it wrong. And they will figure out how to make it better. Nobody gets blamed. And to be honest, data transfer fees is negligible if your business is creating any sort of value. You don't need to optimise it.

we just built a new feature for our pretty bandwidth heavy SaaS on R2. Works pretty damn good with indeed massive savings. We just use the AWS-SDK (Node.js) and use the R2 endpoint.

I trust cloudflare far less than AWS. Once my data is in AWS all applications in the same region as the data can use the data without paying anything in transfer costs.

Also, the prices he quotes are label prices, if you are a customer and you pre purchase your bandwidth under an agreement, it gets _significantly_ less expensive.

R2 is still pretty new. I don't know how well it works in practice in terms of performance and availability. And of course durability, which is difficult if not impossible to judge. S3 has a much longer history and track record, so it has the advantage here. And if all your stuff is inside AWS already there are advantages to keeping the data closer. Depending on how the data is used, egress might also not always be such a major cost.

But yes, the moment you actually produce significant amounts of egress traffic it gets absurdly expensive. And I would expect competitors like R2 to gain ground if they can provide reasonably competitive reliability and performance.

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