[erichocean]

> You don't need to have $400 million revenue and do custom data centres to pay less than the published rates for any of the public cloud providers.

Out of curiosity, at what point should someone look into negotiating lower rates with AWS (in particular)? And how would they go about that?

[vidarh]

Anything more than a few tens of thousands per year, I'd say. I'm not sure where the lower threshold would be of when they'd offer it, but I know once you get into a couple hundred k a year, getting massive discounts is at least possible (know of specific cases). I'd say do your homework on what renting managed hosting would cost, and what using reserved instances would cost, and talk to your account manager and use the managed hosting prices as the argument (they will be far lower).

A lot of my consulting is on cutting hosting costs, and I've yet to have a client where we couldn't come up with substantially cheaper alternatives than AWS, but sometimes being able to show your account manager that you know how insanely high their margins actually are and that you have a credible alternative makes enough of a difference for them to end up sticking with AWS.

It also depends on ease of cutting the cost, I'd say. E.g. if 90% of your cost is bandwidth, and it's mostly serving up static assets, it's trivial to cut the cost dramatically by rolling your own mini-CDN outside of AWS (bandwidth prices at AWS are between 10x and 50x higher than the cheapest competitors depending on region if looking only at managed hosting or other cloud providers - more if you're large enough to look at peering options).

[erichocean]

Thank you.