How EC2 bills data transfer vs computing resources

01 December 2009 | general

This is a follow up on a previous post about Amazon’s EC2 cloud services. You may recall that I had the Kontrollbase demo server hosted there until I was hit with a >$370 bill for less than 2 weeks of service. Now, you may think you want to say “hey you should have known the cost..” or something similar and you would be partially correct. However, now that I have the breakdown in daily usage I see that it is in fact not the CPU/resource usage or having the larger VM instances running like I previously thought but all due to data transfer. EC2 does not include data with their servers – it’s all separate and it’s a complete rip off when compared to any major hosting provider.

The last time I saw such ridiculous charges for data was from 1&1 internet when a server I admin’d was hit with a 1000% increase in traffic due to CCbill being cracked and passwords to the site revealed on some cracker forum. Anyway, be warned – it is not the virtual computing resources you pay for at Amazon’s EC2 that will make you dislike the product (because those parts work great!) but the data transfer charges. They do not include ANY transfer like most hosting providers do (currently I have the demo server @ Server Beach and they include 10Mbit sustained (~3300Gbit/month) for their $99/m servers. Amazon you disgust me. If they had made that clear from the start I never would have signed up. Anyone interested in seeing the breakdown for data transfer vs the cost of the actual computing resources, feel free to check out the CSV file here.


6 Responses to “How EC2 bills data transfer vs computing resources”

  • 1 Richard Thomas Says:
    December 1st, 2009 saat: 2:38 pm

    http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

    You will find multiple references to the pricing page

    They clearly show the bandwidth fees, they even have a calculator that will provide you an estimate.

  • 2 themattreid Says:
    December 1st, 2009 saat: 2:44 pm

    I never said I didn’t know where the pricing page was, I said I was disgusted by the bill and the lack of including bandwidth in the contract like other providers do. I didn’t use very much bandwidth at all, especially not more than I get with a 10Mbit connection at Server Beach and yet Amazon is charging me almost 4x as much for less than a month of service. That’s is what is a rip off here.

  • 3 admin Says:
    December 1st, 2009 saat: 2:47 pm

    Sheeri, for some reason your comment didn’t make it so I’m pasting it in.
    —-
    Author : Sheeri K. Cabral (Pythian) (IP: 68.162.218.211 , static-68-162-218-211.BOS.east.verizon.net)
    E-mail : awfief@gmail.com
    URL :
    Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=68.162.218.211
    Comment:
    http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing seems pretty upfront to me — you have sections for:

    On-Demand instances
    Reserved instances
    Data Transfer
    Amazon Elastic Block Store
    Elastic IP Addresses
    Amazon CloudWatch
    Auto Scaling
    Elastic Load Balancing

    Note the 3rd one, “Data Transfer”.

    Does Amazon still disgust you? They were totally upfront with pricing. You just failed to read the whole page.
    —

    Now for my response. Yes, I am still disgusted. I think it’s a joke that they can charge as much as they do for bandwidth when every other provider makes their money on the hardware and actual resource usage. The trivial amount of bandwidth I used to setup the demo server and then run it for a week or so should definitely not equal $370+ in my mind. Anyone that wants to pay that much for it, well go ahead. But I think it’s a rip off.

  • 4 Nils Says:
    December 3rd, 2009 saat: 3:43 am

    This is exactly the reason why I don’t understand all the hype. It’s just too damn expensive to be an alternative to traditional hosting in most cases.

  • 5 themattreid Says:
    December 3rd, 2009 saat: 2:16 pm

    Exactly what I was going for Nils. I get the point of virtualization but the pricing seems like a step back to 1998.

  • 6 Ben Hicks Says:
    December 3rd, 2009 saat: 10:32 pm

    for that price i’d expect the connection to be redundant and secured by firewalls and a monitoring team. The price might be ok (in my option) if they have such service above average-joes-hosting – but the details are once again lacking.

    the traffic price is also what kept me from using ec2 – i just can’t think of anything “cool” to do without causing a lot of traffic. If i got that right you also pay the traffic into s3 from ec2.