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by password4321 672 days ago
> move to a slower-but-flat-rate provider

As I'm sure you're aware: https://www.scaleway.com/en/stardust-instances/ "up to 100Mbps" for $4/month

3 comments

Hetzner.de has 1 gbps unlimited or 10 gbps with a 20TB limit on their bare metal servers. And those can be bought very cheap if you don't need any special hardware.
32.4 TB for $4, or approximately 700 times cheaper than AWS. Neat.
It's unlikely they would let you run it full tilt the entire month. I'm not aware of any VPS providers that have a true unlimited data plan. Would love to be proven wrong.
Bare metal love
It's clearly a VPS, not bare metal.
I wonder what it would take for AWS to lower their outbound BW pricing to something that's not insane.

I'm beginning to think that the only feasible solution is changing the law.

I'm suffering from fatigue from all the political commercials in which every single Democrat apparently single-handedly reduced the price of insulin. As if government-mandated pricing were a good thing.

If something is overpriced, somebody should jump in and take advantage of a business opportunity. If nobody is jumping in, perhaps the item is not overpriced. Or perhaps there is some systemic issue preventing willing competitors from jumping in. Imagine if somebody tackled the real issue and it unclogged the plumbing for producers of all sorts of medicine beside insulin at the same time.

If a government mandates the sale of an item below the cost of production, they drive out all producers and that product disappears from the market. That is, unless they create some government subsidy or other graft to compensate the government-appointed winners. Any way you slice it, it is a recipe for disaster.

If parties are allowed to compete fairly with each other, somebody will offer a cheaper price. This is already the case with AWS. Consumers may decide that the cheaper product is somehow inferior, but that is not a problem that lawmakers should interfere in.

Interesting you should choose insulin, as it's made by ~3 companies, and 2002-2013 the price went up 6x, while the price of the inputs dropped. ISTR that right after that it went up another 3x to over $300/vial. Thankfully, I only needed a vial once every few months, it was for my cat.

"Evergreening", a process where the drug manufacturers slightly change the formula or delivery when one patent is running out, to gain a new patent, then stop manufacturing the old formula.

Not saying I want to see AWS bandwidth prices regulated (though I think they could come down and still make a massive profit). But in the case of insulin, the industry has left little choice but government intervention.

I think you’re forgetting that it is regulatory capture that has made medicine cost so much in the US in the first place.
> If something is overpriced, somebody should jump in and take advantage of a business opportunity

insulin is off patent. anyone can in theory manufacture it, but the ROI is just not worth it even at the current prices. Manufacturing it is not easy, there are humongous amounts of regulations, you will probably need to do a couple of clinical trials too... so you end up with an oligopoly that are incumbents that nobody wants to challenge, and prices that are all aligned.

Please don't suggest more laws like this. If you don't like AWS pricing, use something else. That's the only real way to develop alternatives.
You disliked my idle thought so much that you needed to reply twice? :)

The various factors causing strong lock-in effects, their dominance, and the insanely high pricing of moving data out of AWS - I wouldn't be surprised if they got their antitrust moment within a few years.

>I'm beginning to think that the only feasible solution is changing the law.

Do you also think we should legislate the price of BMWs? You're not forced to buy AWS, there's plenty of alternatives, and the prices that AWS charges is well known. I'm not sure why the government should be involved other than a vague sense of "I want cheap stuff".

Contabo also might be an option: https://contabo.com/en/vps/

Throttling after 32 TB: https://help.contabo.com/en/support/solutions/articles/10300...

Some commentary: https://hostingrevelations.com/contabo-bandwidth-limit/

I wouldn't say that they're super dependable or that the VPSes are very performant, but for the most part they work and are affordable.

Alternatively, there's also Hetzner, as sibling comments mentioned: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/

They do have additional fees, though:

> You’ll get at least 20 TB of inclusive traffic for cloud servers at EU and US locations and 1 TB in Singapore. For each additional TB, we charge € 1.00 in the EU and US, and € 7.40 in Singapore. (Prices excl. VAT)

I also used to use Time4VPS, however they have gradually been rising prices and the traffic I'd get before being throttled would be less than that of Contabo.