| They'll sell you the pipe without any guarantee and some include provisions that allow them to instantaneously downgrade your pipe if they decide your servers are a traffic management problem. I can't speak to GCP, AWS is pretty generous, and they even suggest you contact them for a deal once you're in the low 5 figure range, and that's across all services in a region. If you move enough data the discount is significant and approaches overage pricing at VPS providers. I'm sure. If I were running things that were more bandwidth heavy as opposed to integration heavy, we would have gone that route as well, and we would have gone through the extra trouble of getting some provider diversity and redundancy built in. For smaller cases, they can avoid all that overhead and just trade those into bandwidth costs. Which, if your costs do get high, it's much easier to build an external caching network then it is to build a bunch of external dependent infrastructure with bare metal providers. In any case, I don't think it's that AWS is taxing it's users unfairly, I think the costs are a solid reflection of where their engineering effort and variable costs are concentrated. It seems like maintaining symmetry in bandwidth is one of those. As a customer I can use petabytes one month and then zero bytes the next month. They have link agreements with multi year terms and possible "balance payments" required if symmetry is not maintained. This type of bandwidth isn't as cheap to provide under these terms. |