The extremely high egress prices for any cloud don't seem to have hurt their popularity much so far. So I suspect they all don't want to give up their cash cow.

Compared to a VPS or renting a dedicated servers, the egress costs can be enormous if you come even close to using the traffic contingent you get with many VPS or dedicated hosts.

Just as a comparison, a dedicated server with Hetzner for ~50-70 EUR per month includes 30 TB of traffic, which would be at least 2,400 EUR on the Google Cloud.

Just put the edges somewhere else, use GCP for compute and push the actual delivery to the edge.

Huh? VPS and dedicated hosts usually charge below a penny per gigabyte over your traffic limit, and if you open a support ticket they will usually work with you towards something in the sub-$4 per TB range.

Are major clouds actually facing any real competition because of bandwidth pricing?

On another note, Softlayer used to have generous multiple TB allocations for their dedicated servers but they took them away. It's likely that anyone needing high bandwidth, especially for static content, will have other edge networks and CDNs in place for that use case.

Of course not. They are not competing with Digital Ocean / Linode at all.

If that's true, why did Amazon come out with Lightsail?

https://amazonlightsail.com

That's just a card to be in the game, it's hardly their mainline product.

My Lightsail gives me 3TB. It's a huge card for me. The only reason I use them at all for hosting.

Sorry to be blunt, but they don't really care that much about you. Sure, they want to take your money, they don't want to leave it on the table.

But most of their money comes from the Netflixes and the Adobes of the world, not from mom-and-pop stores :p

:-) Well Bezos is a genius, perhaps he will figure out that mom and pop businesses are the backbone of the world economy.

Based on how the AWS services look, I somehow doubt it. Cloud Formation, RDS Oracle, to name a few thing, seem quite enteprise-y :)

> biggest price differences between them and smaller hosts such as Linode and DigitalOcean.

I suspect that the smaller hosts' plans traffic quota is sold below their own cost - assuming (correctly) that the vast majority of customers would not use anywhere close to the limit.

The traffic quota also scales much slower than the price as you move to bigger, more expensive plans.

I guess that it's fine if you reach the limit on a few servers, but if you rented 1000 x $5 droplets from Linode/DigitalOcean, and maxed out all of their traffic quota, you would get kicked out. Has someone tried to use these hosts just for cheap file servers?

> if you rented 1000 x $5 droplets from Linode/DigitalOcean, and maxed out all of their traffic quota, you would get kicked out.

It might happen but it doesn't refute the parent's point:

"Right now Linode's and DO's smallest $5 plan offers 1TB of transfer, which would cost $85.00 on Google's new standard plan."

I don't know about DO Droplets but you can get a reasonably priced dedicated server* at OVH and knock yourself out piping 4-8 TB to the world for ~$40/mo.

* It's hard to push a lot of useful data with a tiny VPS.

OVH isn't an American company, that probably matters to a lot of use cases.

OVH has a datacenter in Canada which is very well connected to North America, they are also working on their USA datacenter.

A US location will be welcome. Might have to start using a real server for a change.