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Comment by NorwegianDude | Hacker News Reader

> Over 90 percent of our customers already incur no data transfer expenses out of AWS because we provide 100 gigabytes per month free from AWS Regions to the internet.

Damn, that's a lot of tiny customers. 100 GB per month is less than what many use on their phone during a month. So basically, most people using AWS is definitely people who don't need it to scale.

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My personal AWS account is just for storing some archive files in S3, which incurs a $0.02/month bill and which Amazon can't be bothered to charge.

Its not that they are not bothered to charge its just that cc processing fees are higher than what you are being billed. It will accumulate and they will charge it when it reaches a certain amount

Backblaze must be similar.

I only have ~80 GB stored, and rather than being charged 44 cents per month, I'm being charged 88 cents every 2 months.

You can have terabytes of data for internal purposes, analytics, etc. That never moves out of the data center except when you want to migrate.

The bigger you are the less data you might have to export - because all your tools are inside the fence.

Small companies download reports/analytics/files from X and upload them to Y, etc, big companies do it all inside.

> The bigger you are the less data you might have to export

You're strictly limiting yourself to companies that provide no internet-facing services?

I wonder what customer sizes really matter to them. Are the bulk of their revenue a lot of small/medium-sized companies paying a few 10-100k a year, or do they have a few government/bigcorp whales subsidizing the service for the rest?

> So basically, most people using AWS is definitely people who don't need it to scale.

This is what we would expect, right? Surely the huge majority of AWS users are small and wouldn't have the slightest interest in owning/managing their own hardware.

Well the biggest "scalers" have become Cloud providers themselves.

I think there's a good saying about Cloud and scaling, paraphrasing - "if you don't start on Cloud that's unwise and if you (over)stay that's insane". I guess as your solution reaches maturity and stability (no sudden swings in usage or complete changes in the architecture) then you should start thinking about some on-prem solution with maybe the hardware being leased along with maitenance.

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