[kyledrake]

I see a lot of these sort of articles, and I really have to bring this up, because I don't understand why people don't realize it when they decide where to host their infrastructure:

Bandwidth on GCP (and AWS and most of the other providers) is really, really, really expensive. $0.12 per gigabyte, upwards of $0.19 per gigabyte for Asia. Paying $0.12 for every time you send an Ubuntu ISO is crazy. A bored script kiddie could just run up your bandwidth costs to thousands of dollars just for the hell of it. A DDoS could make you declare bankruptcy.

I have a server with OVH I can theoretically push 100+TB per month through and only pay $100. I get DDoS protection included. It may not be perfect DDoS, but it's not the $6000/mo I'd need to pay for Cloudflare to get the same thing with GCP (I need wildcards), plus the $0.12 per GB for anything not cached by them.

I know from people in the industry that they pay less than a cent per GB. Google, if you want to differentiate your cloud services, start charging better prices for bandwidth and do something about DDoS (project shield should be baked into your offerings). $0.02 would be reasonable and you'll still make a profit. That goes for all the other "great value" cloud services that are actually very expensive for anybody doing work that actually needs bandwidth on the internet.

[virtuallynathan]

To put those numbers into standard transit pricing using US-East (AWS):

Up to 10 TB / month - $30/Mbps

Next 350 TB / month - $16.50/Mbps

Traffic within the same Region - $3.50/Mbps

Traffic to another region - $6.50/Mbps

The outbound traffic starts at $45/Mbps in AsiaPac and $85/Mbps in Latin America.

In the US and most of the EU, at >1Gbps (~350TB/mo) volume, transit pricing is well under $1/Mbps. Most of Asia should be under $10/Mbps, and south america is quite a bit higher, but not $70/Mbps.

See: https://www.telegeography.com/press/press-releases/2015/09/0...

http://blog.telegeography.com/bandwidth-and-ip-pricing-trend...

[kyledrake]

$1/Mbps seems closer to what I would expect the price to be. 30x over market is an astonishing price markup. I don't understand how any startup I've built that used a lot of bandwidth could take that risk on infrastructure. I would actually be concerned about being successful.

[sofaofthedamned]

I used to be with OVH, but now my servers are with online.net and I see what you are saying.

If I had a startup - i'd have a few of these servers as the baseline, then i'd scale up with AWS. I assume i'd be using Kubernetes for this or something similar. Basically i'd be using the cloud for what it's supposed to be - taking the extra load off.

Does anybody do this?

[gizzlon]

"A bored script kiddie could just run up your bandwidth costs to thousands of dollars just for the hell of it"

This is really interesting and I wonder if it's true? Do you know of this happening? I don't. Is that just because no-one thought about it or is it maybe not as easy as it seems? Or is there another reason?

The bandwidth costs under normal circumstances should be trivial to calculate, right? I guess many services do not serve that much outgoing data, especiall after caching. But, of course, use the right tool for the job etc :) If the job is serving ISOs, then maybe PaaS it not the right tool.

[kyledrake]

We're entering a new phase of the web, where almost every home internet is going to have 1Gbps connections, upwards of 10Gbps in some areas (US Internet has already started providing 10Gbps to home customers in Minneapolis).

The idea that datacenter egress bandwidth can continue to be this expensive is ridiculous. A company using AWS or GCP is missing out on opportunities that are about to be created by very fast internet connections. It's an entire "disruptive tech" innovation that these cloud services will be ineligible to compete with (16-30x markups!) I've run the numbers on switching to AWS and GCP numerous times, and the numbers never add up to something I could sustain for Neocities.

I might consider AWS if I'm just making internal apps for a giant company that thinks it's a great deal because their previous vendor was charging 10x more, but as a small startup doing something internet-facing, there's no way I could ever operate safely with that infrastructure risk. I would need success insurance or something. Short term I'd be fine, but long term AWS would be eating my profit margin and possibly even my company.

To say nothing of malicious bandwidth leeching attacks. It's just dangerous all around. I'm not even sure this has a name yet - Economic Service Attack? I remember reading a story of how GreatFire got DDoSed by China and got a $10-30k+ bill from Amazon because of it.

The rest of their offerings are more or less reasonable (their EC2 instances are a bit overpriced IMHO, but reasonable). But the bandwidth prices are just simply not. GCP could get massive switchover from AWS if they simply lowered their bandwidth egress prices.

It's fairly telling to me, lastly, that AWS/GCP/etc. charge nothing for incoming bandwidth and then charge a LOT for outgoing. Just making a backup of the sites on Neocities from S3 to another service would cost over $20 each time I did it (I can do it based on timestamps if I track all the files stored there in a database (double databases == yuck), but I'd much rather have access to something like integrated rsync support to make this process simpler and much more efficient).

[gizzlon]

I'm not arguing that cloud is always the best option, but clearly there are many examples where profit per client far exceeds the cost per client. And btw, bandwidth is probably the simplest thing to calculate :) There are pros and cons with cloud, no doubt, but you seem to be ignoring the pros.

Anyway, on to the much more intereting question of misuse. I found these links interesting:

http://serverfault.com/questions/231116/amazon-ec2-bandwidth...

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?messageID=294632 (linked from the 1st)

Seems like the answer is that you must deal with it yourself, or get cloudflare or similar to help you. I'm my limited experience, other most data centers / hosting providers charge for traffic, AWS etc. are just more expensive.

Edit: This is not "Denial Of Service Attack" btw, it's a "Bankrupt by Cloud Costs Attack" :D

[jacques_chester]

> Bandwidth on GCP (and AWS and most of the other providers) is really, really, really expensive.

It's cheaper if you use the CDNs they provide for this purpose.

[schmichael]

Edit: I can't read or delete this post. Ignore me.

[kyledrake]

http://i.imgur.com/RWRJ27u.png

I see GB not TB?