Cloud Bandwidth: The Big Rip-Off?
Many of our customers complain about it and we think that they are right. Coming from the dedicated servers world, where you can get bandwidth in multiple TBs for a modest price, it just feels that something is wrong when you check the equivalent Cloud pricing. But let’s take a closer look.
To do a fair comparison, we will focus on the same region, as bandwidth prices tend to change from one to another (i.e. much more expensive in Asia). So, for the sake of simplicity, we will only focus on prices in the US. Here’s what the numbers look like for a mid-sized website with around 1000GB/month in traffic.
Since some providers charge a different rate for outgoing / incoming traffic, we’ll keep a ratio of 1:7 incoming vs outgoing i.e. 140GB IN / 860GB OUT.
EXHIBIT A:
| Cloud Provider | Incoming Traffic Price (monthly) | Outgoing Traffic Price (monthly) | Total Price (monthly) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon | Free | $103.08 | $103.08 |
| AppFog | $142.5 | Do not differentiate Incoming vs Outgoing traffic | $142.5 |
| CloudSigma | Free | $43 (subscription rate) | $43 (subscription rate) |
| Dimension Data | Free | $129 | $129 |
| Elastichosts | $300 (burst rate) | $150 (subscription rate) | Do not differentiate Incoming vs Outgoing traffic | $300 (burst rate) | $150 (subscription rate) |
| GoGrid | Free | $103.08 | $103.08 |
| Google App Engine | Free | $103.08 | $103.08 |
| GreenQloud | Free | $129 | $129 |
| HP Cloud | Free | $103.08 | $103.08 |
| iLand | $130 | Do not differentiate Incoming vs Outgoing traffic | $130 |
| ProfitBricks | $60 | Do not differentiate Incoming vs Outgoing traffic | $60 |
| Rackspace Cloud Servers | Free | $154.80 | $154.80 |
| SoftLayer | Free | $86 | $86 |
And now let’s compare this with dedicated and other types of offering:
| Provider | Incoming Traffic Price (monthly) | Outgoing Traffic Price (monthly) | Total Price (monthly) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hetzner (dedicated server hosting) | 10000GB/month Included with each dedicated (6.90€ per additional TB) | Do not differentiate Incoming vs Outgoing traffic | Dedicated servers start at 49€ |
| Linode (Cloud servers) | 800GB of traffic included with their Linode 2048 | Do not differentiate Incoming vs Outgoing traffic | $79.95 (including server) |
| VPS.net (Cloud VPS Servers) | 1TB of traffic included with their smallest server | Do not differentiate Incoming vs Outgoing traffic | $18 (including server) |
We could go on, but this should be enough to get a basic idea.
Some people could argue that these are very different services, and I agree, but here we are talking exclusively about bandwidth and then we should be able to compare.
Apparently pure cloud server providers prices are exorbitant; one might say its somewhere close to a rip-off. Even between cloud server providers, you’ll see huge differences with Rackspace being more than 3 times more expensive than CloudSigma.
It would be interesting to hear an explanation from any of the listed Cloud providers on why this huge difference. Maybe they have their reasons, and we’re interested in hearing from them!
Written by: Pere Hospital
Pere Hospital, CISSP, OSCP, is the CTO and co-founder of Cloudways Ltd. He has over two decades of experience in IT Security, Risk Analysis and Virtualization Technologies. You can follow Pere on Twitter at @phospital
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