It's great to see Amazon continue to push down bandwidth charges when they manage to get prices down. Bandwidth pricing can be incredibly expensive in some parts of the world. With AWS you basically get to take advantage of Amazon's negotiating team and clout while still being able to put nodes near the end-points.<p>(Basically bandwidth in Australia is ridiculously expensive and if you wanted to serve that continent it'd be a big headache, but now you can just spin up a machine on EC2 in that region and use Amazon's prices.)
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!<p>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.<p>If you move a lot of bandwidth, check out Linode.
The thing I love about pricing from organizations like Amazon, is that there is <i>zero</i> pressure, incentive, or intent on their part to curb you from using their resources, or finding you in any way in violation of some implicit "Fair Use" restrictions.<p>For example, in Singapore, Bandwidth from EC2 to the Internet is $0.120 per GB for the first 10 TB. So, if I have a site that sends out 2 TB of data, my bandwidth charges are $240/month, and Amazon is 100% fine with me doing that every month, and I should have zero concern about any type of rate limiting, or restrictions.<p>On the other hand, Digital Ocean (who I <i>do</i> have a VPS with in Singapore) charges me $10/month for a VPS with 2 TB/Transfer. I have no idea what they would do if I actually started using all 2 TB every month, but I can't believe it would end well.<p>I'm curious though - has anyone played around with using the cheap bandwidth of these VPSs to do a "roll your own" CDN? I.E. for $500/month you could purchase 100 Digital Ocean VPS @$5/month and, in <i>theory</i> get 100 * 1 Terabyte, or 100 Terabytes of transfer to the internet a month.<p>I'm pretty sure Digital Ocean would frown on that, but I'm interested in whether anyone has done the obvious thing and tried.
I'm curious how much margin there still is in the bandwidth charges of the big cloud providers. Hetzner only charges 1.39 € per extra TB (and the first 30 TB (!) are free), though the bandwidth quality probably isn't comparable.<p><a href="http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/news/trafficpreis-dauerhaft-reduziert" rel="nofollow">http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/news/trafficpreis-dauerhaft...</a>
Strong incentive to dive in to CloudFront CDN it seems. Transfer from AWS to CloudFront 'edge' caches is now free, and outgoing from CloudFront to the internet is nearly 30% cheaper all of a sudden.
I really don't understand this thing about charging bandwidth. In France we are used to the free and unlimited bandwidth for all providers and hosters (see OVH, Gandi, Dedibox... but also all ISP), and the rare cases when I had to pay my bandwidth (Hertzner), the service was quite bad (routes issues, ipv6 issues, and the throughput was very inconsistent).<p>It really seems to me like some providers are trying to charge for anything in order to extract value.