Last year I compared storage and bandwidth pricing between S3 and a number of hosting providers. I thought it would be interesting to check in on the bandwidth market, and see (in a highly unscientific manner) how prices have changed over the past 8 months.
18 July 2008
Back in July, I compared hosting plans from Slicehost and Hurricane Electric with a dedicated, unmetered 100Mbps line offered by Staminus Communications. Here are those results:
| Plan name | Bandwidth capacity (GB/mo) | Cost ($/mo) | $/GB |
|---|---|---|---|
| SH-256 | 100 | 20 | 0.20 |
| SH-512 | 200 | 38 | 0.19 |
| SH-1GB | 400 | 70 | 0.18 |
| SH-2GB | 800 | 140 | 0.18 |
| SH-4GB | 1600 | 280 | 0.18 |
| HE-Starter | 125 | 9.95 | 0.08 |
| HE-Enhanced | 500 | 24.95 | 0.05 |
| HE-Professional | 2000 | 59.95 | 0.03 |
| HE-Enterprise | 10000 | 299.95 | 0.03 |
| Staminus | 32400 | 679 | 0.02 |
11 March 2009
Revisiting those providers today, I see the following prices:
| Plan name | Bandwidth capacity (GB/mo) | Cost ($/mo) | $/GB |
|---|---|---|---|
| SH-256 | 100 | 20 | 0.20 |
| SH-512 | 200 | 38 | 0.19 |
| SH-1GB | 400 | 70 | 0.18 |
| SH-2GB | 800 | 130 | 0.16 |
| SH-4GB | 1600 | 250 | 0.16 |
| HE-Starter | 500 | 9.95 | 0.02 |
| HE-Enhanced | 1500 | 24.95 | 0.02 |
| HE-Professional | 3000 | 59.95 | 0.02 |
| HE-Enterprise | 10000 | 299.95 | 0.03 |
| Staminus | 32400 | 399 | 0.01 |
Things to Note
Some random observations:
- Bandwidth is noticeably cheaper.
- Different companies took different strategies: Staminus and Slicehost lowered their prices for a fixed offer of bandwidth, while HE raised the bandwidth caps while holding their prices constant.
- Slicehost is becoming relatively more expensive, as the other two providers in this sample cut their $/GB numbers more aggressively.
- HE has a wierd “inverted yield curve”, in which the more expensive plans are less efficient on a $/GB basis. I assume they’re planning to beef up their Enterprise offering in the near future.
- Staminus is still the best deal, but you can do damn near as well (on a $/GB basis) with a basic hosting plan as you can with a dedicated line.
- S3, which never drops below $.10/GB, is still bloody awful, and looking worse (from this narrow perspective) all the time.
S3 Qualifiers
Of course, with S3 you only pay for the bandwidth you actually use; with the other plans, you pay a flat rate, and your $/GB numbers will worsen the further you are from 100% utilization. (At 50%, the $/GB cost doubles.) On the other hand, below the first 10TB S3 charges $.17/GB, plus $.01/10000 GET requests. If your site is serving 25K responses, it will take 40000 GET requests to fetch a GB, so the actual S3 cost for the first 10TB will be $.21/GB. That’s 10x to 20x more expensive than what’s on offer elsewhere, so you can allow for low utilization and still prefer to serve from somewhere other than S3.
Naturally, S3 has other advantages (scale, reliability, etc.) but you’re obviously paying for them.
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