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Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

A bit off topic, but i recently realized how much the cost per cpu is really competitive in cloud offerings compared to reserved instances in regular hosting providers, but the network costs are absolutely outrageous.

Cpu costs may be something 5 to 10 times more expensive in the cloud, but network are close to 100 times. Any hosting provider will offer you a 250 mbps unlimited network access for your macine, whereas consumming that much bandwidth in google cloud for a month will cost you more than 1000$.

How come is the difference that big ?

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> the cost per cpu is really competitive in cloud offerings

> Cpu costs may be something 5 to 10 times more expensive in the cloud

So are CPUs more or less expensive in the cloud?

Also I assume by "cloud offerings" you mean AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and the like, and by "regular hosting providers" you mean GoDaddy, BlueHost and the like? Or perhaps you mean Paas vs Saas offerings?

I believe he means OVH (+Kimsufi, Soyoustart), Online.net, and Hetzner for example.

If you are interested in what 1/100th of AWS price looks, have a look at Online's server order page for example [1].

[1] https://console.online.net/en/order/server

Yes and no: yes you can get a Quad-Core 64GB RAM + SSD server for $55/month (source: https://www.hetzner.de/de/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex51ss...). But there's one more spec that matters: networking. It takes completely different amount of effort to provide 1Gbps connectivity versus 40Gbps per server.

Most of the providers like Hetzner/OVH provide former, while GCE provides the latter. I'm not saying it's bad, in fact for most of the people 1Gbps would be more than enough. But it's not something that is fair to omit.

Disclaimer: I don't work for Google, just from my experience.

OVH offer 1Gbps, 10Gbps and 40Gbps plans: https://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/storage/

I am sure Hetzner would be able to offer the same as an add-on if you contacted them directly.

That being said, you would continue to pay orders of magnitude less for your bandwidth then you would at Google or AWS. There's a bubble in cloud bandwidth pricing, and I don't think it's value-related.

Cpu are more expensive on google cloud than ovh, but that is expected. I'm ok to pay x2 or even x5 for the agility and the power those platform offer (especially when you need autoscaling up and down every single day).

What i don't understand is the network cost factor of x100 to x1000

> How come is the difference that big ?

To a first approximation, CPU and RAM are required to get your site up and running at all. Bandwidth is less so. Bandwidth scales up as your growth scales up.

So it makes sense for cloud providers to make CPU and RAM relatively cheap, and charge unreasonable prices for bandwidth. If you're growing, you're more inclined to pay, since you're seeing success. Plus you're already locked in at that point.

That depends a lot on your cpu / bandwidth ratio. A modern website consume a lot more cpu per request than an online videogame server (my use case), which is basically the equivalent of a websocket router with a little data transformation in the middle.

No kidding! I liken it to buying a soft drink with dinner. It only costs the restaurant 10c to fill the cup, but they charge $2.99 because the people that want it are willing to pay.

Egress is a bitch. Even on a personal project with about 3million MAU, the network costs are crazy. Easily 20x lower by owning my own machines.

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