[gr2020]

Love this new offering. What I don’t love is they are charging for egress bandwidth ($0.01/GB), even in the same data center [1]. I can understand it for outbound to internet or other data centers, but this is hard to swallow for the same facility.

Hopefully DO will reconsider this!

It also makes me wonder if all access to these databases is via the public network. I’m guessing so.

[1] https://twitter.com/digitalocean/status/1096087824066101248

[GordonS]

Charging for data transfer within the same DC is really unusual - AFAIK, none of the big cloud providers do this. Like you, I just can't understand the rationale behind this decision.

[eddiezane]

To clarify here and from the launch blog post [0].

> Ingress bandwidth is always free, and egress fees ($0.01/GB per month) will be waived for 2019.

In other words, we're not charging while we build this out.

0: https://blog.digitalocean.com/announcing-managed-databases-f...

[gr2020]

Well, while I appreciate you coming here to clarify, and waiving charges for 2019 sounds nice, there’s nothing in that post that says those charges won’t come into effect for the long term.

I guess I personally would want more color on that whole post-2019 egress situation before committing to using the service. That’s just me, though!

[andyfleming]

It's not just you. Paying for egress within the same DC/vendor seems crazy to me.

Edit: It sounds like that might not be the case though. Eddiezane said "We do not plan to charge for private network / VPC traffic."

[eddiezane]

Please see my reply here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19164067

[teej]

I appreciate the clarification, but this reads less as “DO is chill” and more as “wait for your surprise bill in a year”

[eddiezane]

Appreciate you keeping us honest. There are a few things I can say without making false promises.

Once we finish and rollout full VPC support we believe the absolute majority of use cases will not incur bandwidth charges since most apps run on the same DC as their DBs.

We do not plan to charge for private network / VPC traffic.

We have not yet decided to extend the free egress public network bandwidth beyond Dec-2019 and whatever happens we will provide users with time to plan for the change (say 60 days).

If we decide to not extend it, users will incur .01/GB in all DO regions which is one of the most competitive bw fees in the industry.

[Youden]

> If we decide to not extend it, users will incur .01/GB in all DO regions which is one of the most competitive bw fees in the industry.

Hardly. Maybe if you're comparing yourself to the ridiculous prices of AWS, GCP or Azure but definitely not if you look at the rest of the industry.

I can get, assuming bandwidth is kept at a sub-optimal 10% utilization (which should definitely be optimizable by scaling your instances):

- Unlimited traffic with a 250Mbit/s port from OVH for $32/month, which comes to $0.003/GB

- Unlimited traffic with a 400Mbit/s port from Scaleway for 16 EUR/month, which comes to $0.0013/GB

- Overage traffic on any plan from Hetzner for 0.001 EUR/GB.

And then there are the Bandwidth Alliance members who give free egress to CloudFlare, which then charges nothing to most users: Data Space, Dreamhost managed hosting, Linode, Packet.net and Vapor.

If you need even more traffic, you can start to buy transit, which is dirt cheap.

Bandwidth costs are the number one reason I won't even look at most cloud providers.

[ksec]

>And then there are the Bandwidth Alliance members who give free egress to CloudFlare, which then charges nothing to most users: Data Space, Dreamhost managed hosting, Linode, Packet.net and Vapor.

You are stating that as if DO is not a member.

[1]https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/digitalocean/

[Youden]

My words were "Bandwidth Alliance members who give free egress to CloudFlare".

DO is a member but they do not give free egress to CloudFlare (or anyone else).

[jacurtis]

I still think the point is valid. It seems weird to pay for egress fees within the same datacenter. It is understandable for egress to the public web, but for inter-datacenter transfer, it seems less necessary.

While it is nice that egress is not being charged in 2019, I imagine that most people looking for hosted DB solutions are looking for support and cost beyond a 10 month period of time.

[manigandham]

They don't have private networking yet, so it's all public traffic which fits other provider models, although some don't have any bandwidth charges.

[exabrial]

If you configure private networking, there are no bandwidth charges. However they don't have split-horizon DNS, which makes it a manual process.

[api]

They are cheaper in general though, so it's probably still cheaper than most alternatives with similar services.