| 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). |
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