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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

Linode likely over-sells their bandwidth. They also have a "fair use clause" in the terms of service that covers network consumption.

Try to use the full 2 TB every single month on the $10/month tier and see how long before you get a polite email asking you to stop.

Which isn't to say the $240 price tag isn't high, because it is. But they're likely matching Amazon AWS/Azure which charges a similar amount for outgoing data (2 TB is $235-255).

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No, Linode just uses HE.net, Cogent, etc..

http://he.net/ "Get BGP+IPv6+IPv4 for $0.45/Mbps!"

Hurricane Electric is pretty cheap. You can hit 2TB a month on 10mbps. That is only ~$4.50 a month.

There are a couple tricks with it:

1) On a $10 Linode, you aren't going to upload 2TB a month unless you are acting as a file server. Any kind of application [say, wordpress] isn't going to do it.

2) The majority of people won't max out their bandwidth usage because they are running app/database servers on Linode.

They probably take a small loss on the people maxing out their 2TB a month but on average they aren't. It isn't worth the bad PR to kick a small percentage of small net loss customers.

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1292091

fyi, back in 2013 Cogent was doing sub $1/Mbps as well.

Bandwidth from the cheap providers is cheap. The difference is AWS & Google are making their margins on what they charge for bandwidth is my guess.

I've seen Hurricane Electric before but I didn't understand what they were.

Can you explain how they are different from a traditional ISP like Comcast?

They're an ISP that provides service to data centres, not offices/residences. (And some of those client data centres are run by other ISPs—thus making them a "transit provider" for those ISPs.)

The real difference between a 'traditional' ISP and a Level3/Cogent/HE.net/etc is the market space they operate in. Nothing really prevents "Comcast" from acting like "HE" except its not a market they are interested in.

HE.net sells to businesses and provides wholesale bandwidth over fiber its purchased and/or leased routes.

Traditional ISPs sell to the general public and provide last mile connectivity. They then hook up to Level3/Cogent/HE.Net/etc to provide access to the rest of the internet For example, Comcast doesn't have any international PoPs.

http://business.comcast.com/about-us/our-network vs. http://he.net/HurricaneElectricNetworkMap.pdf

Also on Linode the bandwidth is accumulated between all of your nodes. That means if you have 2 nodes each with 2TB, you can spend 3TB on one node without paying overage fees. It's actually cheaper to buy extra nodes for the bandwidth even if you don't use them for compute than to pay their overage fees (which are quite high comparatively).

2TB at $240 isn't high, it's insane. This would be a terribly easy thing for Google to do to cut prices to a point they are still perfectly comfortable with but the competition can't match.

Yes. However, if that is where they make their margins...

Tbh, anything over $.02/GB is overpriced. That is still $20/TB which is plenty. There are CDNs that sell @ $10/TB ffs.

I have a server hosted with Hetzner, and they state that they charge 2 EUR per TBover a 10 TB allowance, so... yeah. $20/TB seems more than just plenty.

Hetzner is a bargain dedicated host that keeps things as close to max capacity as it can. Hetzner has a relatively static customer base compared to a cloud provider that might have customers only spin up VMs during peak hours.

If you are only running on less than 50% utilization during peaks on an average day, you can't charge just 2 Euros for a TB as a cloud provider. The usage of VMs, bandwidth, etc. is very variable when people use you to "autoscale".

I wouldn't be surprised if $20/TB was barely sufficient to cover a 100% markup [e.g. Cost of capacity is $10/TB, selling at $20/TB] because of the fact they'd need alot more capacity than Hetzner would.

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