Comparison of prices for traffic from cloud providers

In this article, I compare the prices of external traffic from Amazon EC2, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Lightsail.

The cost of external traffic is one of the most outrageously overpriced rates in cloud hosting, and there are serious controversies in the industry, especially at Amazon.

For a start, let's compare two alternatives.

Option 1 - Colocation in the data center
100 Mbps (32.85 TB / month) for $ 950 = $ 28.91 for TB or $ 0.028 for GB / month
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About three cents per gigabyte is a typical price you pay for 100 Mbit / s colocation, if you do not enter into special agreements, and this option is easy to find.

Option 2 - Google Fiber for Business
1000 Mbps (328.5 TB / month) for $ 250 = $ 0.76 per TB or $ 0.00076 per GB / month

This is a small glimpse of the future, where traffic will be much cheaper. This future is already available in about 27 US regions. Well, if you live there, but not everyone is available.

Microsoft Azure
1 TB / month - $ 88.65 or $ 0.09 per GB

That's where things get ugly. The price is 3 times higher than on the colotage, and 116 times higher than on Google Fiber.

Google Cloud Platform
1 TB / month - $ 122.88 or $ 0.12 per GB

How can this be? I can not even imagine how Google can put such a high price on its platform. This is 4 times higher than on a kolokeyshne, and 162 times higher than on its own Google Fiber service.

Something is fundamentally wrong here, given Google’s global infrastructure, the scale of its business. Azure prices are terrible, but Google is much worse.

Amazon EC2
1 TB / month - $ 90 or $ 0.09 per GB

Again, 3 times more expensive than on a kolokeshn, and 116 times more expensive than Google Fiber, and if incoming data comes to you, they will take another $ 10 a month, raising the price to $ 0.10 per gigabyte.

Amazon lightsail
2 TB / month - $ 10 or $ 0.005 per GB

At first glance, it looks great, but that makes me angry, because here you have a huge “go” for Amazon EC2 customers who pay 18 times more for their first 2 TB of traffic.

Amazon gives free 2 TB to Lightsail subscribers for $ 10 per month and only 1 GB per month for free to loyal EC2 users.

Anyone who sits on EC2 with five or less t2.micro servers and uses at least some traffic should immediately switch to Lightsail, if there is no compelling reason not to do it. And I can't imagine what an irresistible reason this may be, because Lightsail instances can work with other AWS services.

Actually, it doesn't even matter what size your instances are. You can simply use Lightsail instances as routers and put Cloudflare in front of them, you can have up to five Lightsail instances per account.

For $ 50 per month, you can get 10 TB of outgoing traffic at $ 0.005 per gigabyte.

Conclusion

Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure and Google Gloud Platform - all of them seriously fool their users with traffic tariffs.

Each of the three big players has huge resources, while at the same time, on average, their traffic cost is 3.4 times higher than on a kolokeshn.

If you have serious volumes of traffic, it is better to think twice before moving to the cloud, these tariffs are really absurd, and they can not be justified if compared with the colloquially.

Do you want to stir up the cloud hosting market today? Give traffic at normal prices.

For the record: "I love Amazon AWS!". This is a super flexible and excellent service - I just don’t like their traffic rates;)