[sgk284]

Nope, they all just overcharge like crazy. Bandwidth from any traditional data center will cost you (at most) $0.0015 per GB. That's about 60x cheaper than what AWS costs.

AWS only kind of makes sense until your bill starts approaching that of a full time engineer's salary. Then you can slash costs like crazy by rolling your own infrastructure (at higher risk of downtime). Or pull a Netflix and negotiate wholesale prices.

[tedunangst]

Is that really true? In my experience, "real" data centers always charge by bandwidth, not traffic. You can get 10mbps, or 100, or 1000, but it makes no difference how much data you push. (95th percentile is also common, if you don't commit to a full link.) I've always thought of data quotas as a "consumer" level service. After all, the wires that make up data links don't care about the amount of traffic.

[sgk284]

Yep, that's technically more accurate. I should have added the qualifier that, "for those centers that do charge by traffic this is roughly what they'll charge".