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Comment by wbond | Hacker News Reader

AWS and most other cloud providers have prohibitively expensive bandwidth compared to Linode's bundled bandwidth. With Linode you get a free server to boot!

Just yesterday I compared a VM with 8gb ram moving 4.4TB of data. With Linode you get 8TB for $80 a month. Yesterday AWS was $630 for the same server and the 4.4TB of bandwidth. For that price on Linode you can get 4 16gb servers, totaling 32 cores and 64TB of bandwidth. Even with the just announced AWS price reduction, it is still extremely expensive.

If you move a lot of bandwidth, check out Linode.

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It irks me that every time AWS comes up people compare the pricing with simple VPS providers that only sell virtual machines and a few bells and whistles.

For starters, users that burn a lot of bandwidth probably don't do it by serving files from a VPS in a single location. In an AWS context, they may be using S3, Cloudfront and all the features and services that come with it. Setting all of that up on DIY VPS boxes (and maintaining it) may be fun for a hobby, but in business that's all costs. The cost of bandwidth is a trivial footnote.

Saying Linode's bandwidth is cheaper is like saying steak is cheaper at the butcher than it is at a restaurant.

I currently use 5TB a month. I pay $80 with Linode. If I switched to AWS, as of yesterday I would have payed $630 for November.

I am not understanding how my comparison is wrong.

That may be true, but try building a CDN on top of AWS and you'll be out of cash pretty quickly with their bandwidth prices.

It seems like a bad strategic decision to try to build a CDN on top of a platform that already offers a CDN while expecting to be cheaper than their economy-of-scale-driven CDN.

Not to say that you couldn't build a CDN on AWS, but if you're going to do it, wanting to do it for cheaper than someone who doesn't pay markup on the same instances (Amazon) isn't realistic.

This is true, but not all content is fit for CloudFront or other CDNs.

This is an unfair comparison. Like others have mentioned in this thread they have subtle items in their terms and conditions that prevent you from actually using all that bandwidth 100% month by month. They can offer these prices by overselling their bandwidth.

You can move a lot of bandwidth for sure but as soon as you start using droplets or linodes for the sole intent of using its' included bandwidth (to self-build a CDN on it for example) you'll be shut down in no time.

I'm currently at 5TB of my 8TB cap and Linode hasn't batted an eye.

If you are comparing apples with bananas you should also compare the Linode prices with Hetzner, there you get 4c/8t,32GB,30TB for under 80$.

How is an AWS EC2 instance used for serving files a banana, but a Linode instance serving files an apple?

Bandwidth on EC2 VMs is crazily expensive, especially when you add the fact that you need to use the most expensive instances to get decent speeds.

On the other hand, if you have some heavy static files to serve, the scalability of S3 is hard to beat. It can serve the files more reliably than anything you can come up with.

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