AWS and Google Cloud want people to think that, so that they can keep selling people McDonalds and charging Michelin prices for it.

Market-rate quality bandwidth is closer to $0.005-$0.015/GB. That's with peering to eyeball ISPs like Comcast and everything. Don't believe me, go to Voxility and crunch the numbers yourself.

Their marketing guys say about it what they're going to say. But under the hood, you tell me if you're getting something different:

http://bgp.he.net/AS20473#_asinfo http://bgp.he.net/AS16509#_asinfo http://bgp.he.net/AS63949#_asinfo

Oh BTW, DigitalOcean's site just resolves to a Cloudflare controlled IP. If they can't successfully run their own servers on their own network, I won't either. You can have a different opinion here, but that's mine. I like to see my ISPs eating their own dog food.

That said, they are a business, and it's their job to make their bandwidth policies clear and enforce them. Either they're ok with a few users using tons of bandwidth or they can't be bothered to put in place a clear policy. Either way, it's not the user's problem.

  How much bandwidth do you provide? What is the transfer limit?

  Your server comes with between 200Mbit/s and 800Mbit/s
  of internet bandwidth depending of your server. Checkout
  the pricing page to find the exact value. The internal
  bandwidth is only limited by the speed of your network card.

  There is no transfer limit, transfer is unlimited.

That's the bandwidth policy. I've never had them crack down on me using the bandwidth I'm paying for, never heard anyone else say they've had a problem either

I have to disagree in part here - No matter what is going on with the ISPs networking etc I want to be able to see status updates. Hosting off-network is great for this.

In DigitalOcean's case they can of course use multiple of their own regions I suppose, but if Cloudflare does the job the box is ticked for me

The CPU on the other hand isn't the beefiest (there are comparative benchmarks floating around), the advantage is probably going to be the predictable latency since it (almost) all runs on bare metal.

Also, I'd like to understand this:

>the advantage is probably going to be the predictable latency since it (almost) all runs on bare metal.

Surely you get a VM don't you? How can it run on bare metal while giving you full access to your image? What did you mean by this bare metal remark . . . Thanks!

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=1+month+in+seconds

[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=136+mb%2Fsecond+*+1+month

Almost exactly 8 times, as a matter of fact :)

I use Mb/s for megabits/s and not megabytes, so that comes out to a bit more than 40TiB, 20 up and 20 down.

(The 136Mb/s I estimated was a big too high, actually. Here is my bandwidth chart if you're interested: https://i.imgur.com/l1rCeHC.png)

>Surely you get a VM don't you? How can it run on bare metal while giving you full access to your image? What did you mean by this bare metal remark . . . Thanks!

I believe they have their own custom hardware that they manage directly, they spin one up and you run bare metal on one of these with some local SSDs attached. With the exception of, I think, the VPS which is KVM.

Do you run a web server on yours? Can you check locally what your actual latency is for curl-ing (or wgeting) a page? I mean the actual timestamp difference from your local machine, such as your laptop or desktop. I don't intend to have a lot of traffic but I really, really hate latency. thanks for all this info btw.

Hope that helps.