Cloudflare doesn't charge for bandwidth. I always throw cloudflare on top of anything I do, not because I really need a CDN or anything, but because the bandwidth cost would bankrupt me otherwise. The ceo of cloudflare gave the rationale on why they don't charge:
> There’s a fixed cost of setting up those peering arrangements, but, once in place, there’s no incremental cost. That’s why we have similar agreements to Backblaze in place with Google, Microsoft, IBM, Digital Ocean, etc. It’s pretty shameful, actually, that AWS has so far refused. When using Cloudflare, they don’t pay for the bandwidth, and we don’t pay for the Bandwidth, so why are customers paying for the bandwidth. Amazon pretends to be customer-focused. This is a clear example where they’re not.
They also do charge for Enterprise plans, but instead of transparent pricing I got high-pressure sales techniques and black box pricing offers - which then anchored our rate so that as we grow past our current contract, we're forced to upgrade at any point with pricing based solely on our original negotiation.
Frankly, while I save money using Cloudflare over Azure's CDN right now, it's left a very sour taste in my mouth and I'll be jumping their ship as soon as I have time to find a suitable alternative.
If you have the ability to shift your entire enterprise CDN away from them, why not first try renegotiating?
No, it's two variables - the egress charges you refer to and the actual cost to store the data.
We[1] have found that it is, as you might expect, quite a bit simpler to charge for just the storage and forget about metering the usage/bandwidth/transfer.
So we have typically had our price point higher than the B2s or Wasabis of the world, but there's just one simple number to think about - and no potential for surprises in the billing.
I will admit to having a bit of concern over adding 'rclone'[2] to our platform and the potential for users to just burn bandwidth using an rsync.net account as a "transfer host" but that is why we peer with he.net and their cheap an plentiful 10gb pipes.
[1] rsync.net
[2] ssh [email protected] rclone s3:/bucket gdrive:/blah/blah
Which is to say, each of our five[1] regional POPs have a single connection provided through a dumb switch one hop from he.net[2].
They have no interconnection or dependencies to one another.
No routers, no firewalls, no balancing, no failover. When rsync.net fails, it's a very, very boring failure.
We've had zero network outages in the last 60 months or so.
[1] Fremont, San Diego, Denver, Zurich, Hong Kong
[2] init7 in Zurich ...
The example given above for comparison, Hetzner, also doesn't charge for inbound and internal transfer AFAIK. Nor "the additional systems a customer uses". You pay a charge for the server, you get some amount of traffic included, and if you go over, the additional traffic costs something like $1.1/TB. That's all you pay.
> So it might be fairer if AWS broke out separate line items for internal, incoming and outgoing data transfer
This explanation doesn't cut it for me - most (all?) "traditional" VPS providers don't charge for ingress traffic, and I doubt anyone, ever, has charged for internal traffic.
So what exactly is 'all the networking charges' comprised of, other than egress data?
That companies don't charge for specific things doesn't mean those things don't cost them anything. It just means they're trying to work out a pricing scheme that scales with customer usage and is broadly understandable. So "data egress" is really just a proxy for "how much stuff you're doing with the networking subsystems of AWS."
Same thing with EC2, there are a whole pile of costs that are summed up with "time you rented an instance."
Of course there are is an internal cost of doing business, and peripheral infrastructure cost - but if I pay $100 for service "A" I reasonably expect that fee pays for service "A". Instead, egress bandwidth costs seem to be used to trick customers into thinking services are cheaper than they really are.
For egress bandwidth costs, I'd assume it included, well, the egress bandwidth cost.
But I think level3 is associated with:
https://www.centurylink.com/business/hybrid-it-cloud/public-...
And while they have a call-us price list (if you have to ask...) - they at least state:
"Public and Private high-capacity networking options up to 10Gbps. Note: there is no charge for internal data center traffic. Cost on a per-GB-out model"
I have no idea what they charge pr gb for this cloud product however.
And I think the charges for inter-AZ transfer are to incentivize customers to do that.
Of course, to make them fully independent, you have to replicate everything, so you wind up buying several redundant copies of your system...
Yeah, and keeping around warm systems ready to failover in case of a zonal outage seems like a preposterous waste of resources.
The alternative... to keep around multiple replicas of your system in different zones, all ready to accept traffic and which do serve traffic, seems more practical and less wasteful.
If instead of availability being the only value, there would be a more value provided from actually using such resources, more folks would adopt cross-AZ architectures which would be a win-win for both the customer (get HA for lower or no cost and go down less often and succeed in the market) and thus the cloud provider (keep raking in the steady cloud revenue as the customer grows).
This is one of those gotcha's that company's hit. They see the public pricing page and think "wow that is much cheaper than one my internal IT department charges for X", and then when they go to actually implement they find that "best practice" says they basically have to more than double or even triple the cost to get a reliable system (more because not only do you have to duplicate all the infrastructure into a second AZ, you are getting charged for the replication traffic between them).
This explains the cost.
Price probably should be based on value, not on cost. Why do they charge for it? Because they decided it's a good way to make money and profit.
This is, oddly enough, similar to a debate people have about consumers TV or Internet: should pricing be "unlimited" or "a la carte"?
AWS is combining all your networking charges into one lump "outgoing data transfer" fee. So it's heavily marked up in comparison to what they're paying for the outgoing data transfer, and you're not sure how much is profit vs. whether it's going to cover all their other costs.
So it might be fairer if AWS broke out separate line items for internal, incoming and outgoing data transfer, plus all the additional systems a customer uses.
I think AWS's billing is probably already on the falling side of diminishing marginal returns. That is, it's complex enough that more information would tend to hinder customers from getting the best price. Right now, if I plan to reduce my data charges, I have one variable to tinker with. If we expand this, it would mean I'm having to balance incoming / internal and outgoing charges. That sounds simple, but in terms of engineering it can be very complex.
The next claim is that this biases customers not to move. Of course, Azure and GCP have the same arrangement, so while you pay to move out of AWS, you don't pay to move in to Azure or GCP. So all the vendors are attempting to lock you in to their product, and at the same time trying to extricate you from their competitors, overall it's a wash.
So, yes, part of the motivation for egress charges is that ingress is a loss leader. But it's also true that egress is a metric that does, for the vast majority of their customers, directly translate into customer value. If there's a compelling case for doing it differently, someone should do it and see if it works.