[kyledrake]

I knew a guy that ran a Subway sandwich store. He told me that they make their profit margin on the soda.

At AWS, the bandwidth is the soda. They mark it up 18x over market rate. The more successful you are, the more you pay for it.

That's their business model. They trap you into "cheap prices", and then hit you over the head for the rest of your life with bandwidth costs. They know that it's too hard to leave, so you won't do it.

I can get bandwidth on the market for about $0.013-$0.005 cents per gigabyte. Think about that. That's how much more expensive these cloud services are on BW costs.

[deegles]

Couldn't you use something like AWS Direct Connect to reduce your bandwidth costs? It goes from $0.09/GB to $0.02/GB.

[kyledrake]

No. That only works for a small list of very specific datacenters, and only works for a connection to your own servers in datacenters. It doesn't give you the price you want for end-user bandwidth costs, forcing you to fork out an enormous amount of money if you're doing anything that's even remotely content rich.