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otterley • today at 6:33 AM • 0 replies • view on HN

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.