alt Hacker NewsMost people have forgotten just how cheap bandwidth is. Too much AWS lead cloud pricing propaganda brain rot. Without the high prices, your big clouds won't be able to afford 6-7 figs of engineering salary.
If you have questions about bandwidth pricing, just go to lookup the video piracy streaming sites that's almost completely powered by ads. They are not YouTube scale and most barely last a year before they have to come back with a new domain (because of deplatforming, not because they ran out of money).
A terabyte of bandwidth is maybe worth a dollar at scale (amortized globally, some places are more expensive than others i.e. Africa, certain parts of Asia). Yet the managed clouds gouge customers like there's no tomorrow.
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That’s because with managed clouds, you’re not actually paying for egress traffic when you pay for egress traffic. You’re paying your fair share of the incredibly expensive massive, distributed, low-latency, high-bandwidth, reliable network infrastructure used to glue the entire cloud together. The thing that can withstand massive DDoSes without breaking a sweat. It’s textbook cross subsidization.
CloudFlare doesn’t operate a massive cloud infrastructure so they don’t have the same cost structure.
Unfortunately the cloud providers don’t make this clear to the world, leading to a lot of grumbling from people who think bandwidth should be charged on a pure cost-plus model.
> just go to lookup the video piracy streaming sites that's almost completely powered by ads
They are often down, slow, or congested.
Impressive for their low revenue, but I'm not sure how relevant to cloud customers that want better quality than that.
And yes, I know cloud services are often down, slow, or unavailable, but it's a matter of degrees.
A 100 Gbps uplink is an average of $0.03 per Mbps per month for transit. So that would be $0.00093, a tenth of a penny for a terabyte. This is not even counting peering agreements that make sending the bandwidth free, or the 95th percentile billing which makes spikes free to handle. Or that bandwidth is only charged 1 way (eg. If most of your bandwidth is sending data to consumers then sending data to your server is free).
https://resources.telegeography.com/ip-transit-price-erosion...
CloudFlare and the hyperscalers are the reason bandwidth costs have dropped so dramatically.
I remember hearing from a CloudFlare founder not long after they raised an early round how they had to go around negotiating large peering contracts to make enough bandwidth available for their customers. And that Australia was by far the most expensive region because they had very few undersea cables and only a single company providing that access.
End users present like you can always drive up to the gas station and there will always be plenty to fill up your 10-20 gallon tank. But behind the scenes are massive distribution networks and a market making mechanism.
Also I don't buy your premise that illegal video streaming only make money on ads. I'm under the impression they also sell access to a lot of viewer's machines to companies that want to crawl the web and appear to come from lots of residential ISP nodes.