alt Hacker NewsThat sounds really cool — I tend to agree with you that S3 and similar are underutilized, but I remember that essentially all of the providers charge for bandwidth measured in gigabytes and I'm like no. My consumer line is measured in megabits per second and if I have to pay for my data usage the way it's paid for in data centers it would be far more expensive. Somehow consumer ISPs, who have to pay for the lines, are cheaper than than the cloud providers.
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It's because for providers the bottleneck isn't capacity (which is dirt cheap) but IOPS and bandwidth. To keep transfers fast they need to spread data across a lot of physical disks, meaning they often times sit mostly empty. Egress fees are a way to monetize that empty storage and make sure there is an incentive to minimize egress traffic.
We use R2 (not affiliated) which doesn't have egress fees.
> My consumer line is measured in megabits per second and if I have to pay for my data usage the way it's paid for in data centers it would be far more expensive
Well because your provider assumes you are not using all your bandwidth constantly. Cloud bandwidth is only billed for you actually use
Depending on your use case, exposing S3 data with CloudFront will decrease the transport cost.
"I remember that essentially all of the providers charge for bandwidth measured in gigabytes" - sure, but the cost per GB is shockingly cheap. If you're doing things well, you can do a lot inside those pricing structures.
Alternatively you can stand up your own object store services, but that's not something I would like to do.