Comparison of traffic prices from cloud providers

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

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

To begin with, compare two alternative options.

Option 1 - Colocation in a data center of
100 Mbps (32.85 TB / month) for $ 950 = $ 28.91 per TB or $ 0.028 per GB / month

About three cents per gigabyte is a typical price that you will pay for colocation at 100 Mbit / s, if you do not conclude 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 for TB or $ 0,00076 for GB / month

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

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 at colocation, and 116 times higher than at Google Fiber.

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

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

Something here is fundamentally wrong, given the global infrastructure of Google, 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 colocation, and 116 times more expensive than Google Fiber, and if you receive incoming data, they will take another $ 10 per 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 it pisses me off because here is a giant “go you” for Amazon EC2 customers who pay 18 times more for their first 2 TB of traffic.

Amazon provides 2 TB free for Lightsail Plan subscribers for $ 10 per month and only 1 GB per month for free for 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 this. And I can’t imagine what an irresistible reason this may be, because Lightsail instances can work with other AWS services.

In fact, it doesn't even matter what size your instance is. 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 the Google Gloud Platform are all seriously fooling their users with traffic rates.

Each of the three big players has huge resources, at the same time, on average, they have a traffic cost 3.4 times higher than at colocation.

If you have serious volumes of traffic, then it’s better to think twice before moving to the cloud, these tariffs are really absurd, and there’s no way to justify them when compared with colocation.

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 great service - I just don’t like their traffic tariffs;)