[unclebucknasty]

>it is virtually free

The infrastructure comes at some cost though, right? And there must be some cap on the bandwidth / throughput that a given infrastructure can handle.

So, given these, does it make sense to price bandwidth as a throttle?

[martinald]

That's why I said 'virtually'.

Hurricane Electric does 40gig/sec IP transit for $2k/month.

Assuming you used 50% of the capacity of that link that's about 1/200th (I think, numbers are so small) of the cost of AWS for bandwidth.

[unclebucknasty]

>That's why I said 'virtually'.

I hear you, and that is an egregious margin. Just wondering if part of their bandwidth pricing calculation is driven by a goal of constraining their infrastructure costs (or other considerations beyond profit). I'm actually wondering this exactly because it is so egregious.

There is of course a thing wherein if something is free people mindlessly use it. If all AWS customers did this with bandwidth, I wonder how it would impact total usage and AWS's subsequent infrastructure considerations.

I'm no fan of their pricing and I'm sure there's an unhealthy dose of greed in there. Your phrasing just prompted me to consider what other factors might also be involved. And, if part of the rationale is actually to influence customer behavior with disincentives, then by definition there would have to be some pain involved.

[martinald]

No. It's pure margin. OVH and Hertzner et al offer "realistic" bandwidth pricing and they are all fine.

I am almost certain there will be some sort of cartel investigation into this pricing between the big cloud players.

[Aissen]

And at scale, AWS does not pay the HE price. So add another factor 3 to 10 there.

[api]

Yep. Big cloud bandwidth is a 200X markup from list price. Its ludicrous.

It serves two purposes for them. One is obviously a nice profit center. The other is that free ingress but expensive egress causes data to flow in but not out, creating a center of gravity and a form of lock in.