Hacker News Reader

Comment by willtemperley | Hacker News Reader

> CloudFlare is not a tier 1 cloud provider.

Yes, you're legally correct, but the point is AWS are clearly overcharging for egress.

As you say:

> Egress pricing pays for the AWS network infrastructure that is incredibly reliable (hardware failures happen regularly yet almost no one notices) and allows it to operate at scale sufficient to absorb even the largest DDoS attacks.

Cloudflare is also pretty good at absorbing DDoS attacks, yet charge no egress costs.

Maybe the real question is, are the tier-1 providers colluding in overcharging for egress?

View on HN

I don’t think we can say with certainty without knowing more details about their respective network investments. CloudFlare is architected quite differently than the others, and has a much less comprehensive service portfolio. It’s not an apples to apples comparison unless we’re strictly comparing S3 to R2. Choosing to charge less may also be a loss leader or a differentiation play.

I think this underlines the core problem. It's really hard to make a fully informed choice of provider based on costs, and they deliberately make multi-cloud expensive.

Egress costs are fairly clearly a vendor lock in strategy. If I want to transfer 1TB to run on cheaper compute at another provider, that costs me $90 (edit) on AWS as opposed to $0.24 at wholesale prices. It's unlikely to be cost effective so I choose AWS compute.

EDIT: thanks to someonebaggy for pointing out my decimal point error.

Ninety dollars to transfer a terabyte is clearly ridiculous.

It actually costs you $90 on AWS, not just $9

The latency is a bit higher, but IP over Avian Carrier would be cheaper than this.

If they're charging what customers are willing to pay, are they overcharging? I think an axiom of capitalism is that that's the amount you should charge.

Many people avoid T1 clouds because they're so expensive, but they seem to have found an extremely profitable market segmentation consisting of the remainder.

If they were offering it in a competitive market without the special bundling factors, basically nobody would choose their egress. So yes they're overcharging, because they have control of your data.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com