Amazon's Updated Bandwidth Prices Still Can't Beat Ours
June 30, 2011 - by badnima
Amazon's recent announcement that they have eliminated the cost of uploading data into their cloud is certainly good news to developers running their applications on Amazon Web Services. I'm glad to see that Amazon is choosing not to nickel-and-dime customers for every single thing they do. At no cost to upload and lower prices to download data, running your bandwidth intensive app on Amazon should be cheaper now. But let's compare it to Joyent Cloud's pricing, just for the heck of it.
Let's assume that your app uses 5% upload bandwidth and 95% download bandwidth. You approximate cost to transfer data into and out of the cloud on Joyent and Amazon would be:
| Data Transfer | Amazon AWS | Joyent |
|---|---|---|
| 1 GB | $0.11 | $0.00 |
| 10 GB | $1.14 | $0.00 |
| 100 GB | $11.40 | $0.00 |
| 1 TB | $116.74 | $0.00 |
| 10 TB | $1,167.36 | $0.00 |
| 20 TB | $2,042.88 | $1,572.00 |
So by the time you reach 10TB of bandwidth, you're already paying $1167 in just data fees (which Joyent consequently provides gratis up to 10TB). With $1167, you could buy five more 1GB Joyent SmartMachines.
If you're paying AWS $20 a month for an EC2 compute node, and an additional ~$1100 in data fees, wouldn't it make more sense to just pay a predictable $125 a month for better performance and up to 10TB of free bandwidth?