It is absolutely crazy how much AWS charges for data. Internet access in general has become much cheaper and Hetzner gives unlimited AWS. I don't recall AWS ever decreasing prices for outbound data transfer
I think there's two reasons: one, it makes them gobs of money. Two, it discourages customers from building architectures which integrate non-AWS services, because you have to pay the data transfer tax. This locks everyone in.
And yes, AWS' rates are highway robbery. If you assume $1500/mo for a 10 Gbps port from a transit provider, you're looking at $0.0005/GB with a saturated link. At a 25% utilization factor, still only $0.002/GB. AWS is almost 50 times that. And I guarantee AWS gets a far better rate for transit than list price, so their profit margin must be through the roof.
> I think there's two reasons: one, it makes them gobs of money. Two, it discourages customers from building architectures which integrate non-AWS services, because you have to pay the data transfer tax. This locks everyone in.
Which makes sense, but even their rates for traffic between AWS regions are still exorbitant. $0.10/GB for transfer to the rest of the Internet somewhat discourages integration of non-Amazon services (though you can still easily integrate with any service where most of your bandwidth is inbound to AWS), but their rates for bandwidth between regions are still in the $0.01-0.02/GB range, which discourages replication and cross-region services.
If their inter-region bandwidth pricing was substantially lower, it'd be much easier to build replicated, highly available services atop AWS. As it is, the current pricing encourages keeping everything within a region, which works for some kinds of services but not others.
Even their transfer rates between AZs _in the same region_ are expensive, given they presumably own the fiber?
This aligns with their “you should be in multiple AZs” sales strategy, because self-hosted and third-party services can’t replicate data between AZs without expensive bandwidth costs, while their own managed services (ElastiCache, RDS, etc) can offer replication between zones for free.
Hetzner is "unlimited fair use" for 1Gbps dedicated servers, which means their average cost is low enough to not be worth metering, but if you saturate your 1Gbps for a month they will force you to move to metered. Also 10Gbps is always metered. Metered traffic is about $1.50 per TB outbound - 60 times cheaper than AWS - and completely free within one of their networks, including between different European DCs.
In general it seems like Europe has the most internet of anywhere - other places generally pay to connect to Europe, Europe doesn't pay to connect to them.
