Cloud Bandwidth Costs & the True Cost of Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting services too often come with hidden costs.

To be fair to those (other) cloud companies, the costs are not actually hidden maliciously, but their services are priced in such a way that the true costs of cloud hosting are easy to overlook or difficult to fully comprehend.

One of most overlooked or misunderstood aspects of cloud hosting costs is bandwidth pricing.

Bandwidth, also called data transfer, is not usually one of the featured specs touted in cloud hosting promotions and it may not look like it’s a lot of money, but bandwidth pricing can make your cloud costs skyrocket.

Of course, not if you’re getting your cloud hosting from EarthLink Cloud.

All EarthLink Cloud hosting plans come with bandwidth included in the low monthly cost.

Cloud Hosting Bandwidth Charges Compared

Let’s take a look at the true cost of cloud server bandwidth at EarthLink and other top competitors.

The entry-level cloud hosting plan offered by EarthLink Cloud is only $60 a month, and it comes with 1,500GB of bandwidth in and 1,500GB of bandwidth out. So, if you use 1.5TB of bandwidth both ways with EarthLink Cloud, your cost is still just $60.

On the Cloud Server Pricing page at Rackspace, you’ll see a cloud server plan with 1,024MB RAM (the one most comparable to ours) priced at just $43.80 a month. Sounds like a good deal, right?

Maybe not.

Enter 1,500GB of outgoing bandwidth on the Rackspace cost calculator and you’ll see their plan shoot up to an astounding $313.80/mo. (Hey, where’d my $43 plan go?!)

And Rackspace is hardly alone. Go to the cloud computing price comparison engine Cloudorado and you’ll see 13 cloud hosting companies listed.

Prices look pretty good … before you start adjusting the sliders to add the features you need.

Then, as you add the specs that are included in cloud hosting plans from EarthLink Cloud, you see all those “hidden” costs revealed one by one. Finish by adding bandwidth costs for transfers in and out and all but one of the plans is over $100, more than half are over $200, and three are over $400 a month.

Compared to EarthLink Cloud, you’d be paying anywhere from 50% more to over 700% more.

That’s the true cost of cloud bandwidth. And, yes, sometimes the truth hurts.

Just not here at EarthLink Cloud.

See our easy-to-budget-for, flat-rate cloud hosting prices.

August eNewsletter

And the Data Pipe gets bigger again!

Earlier this month we increased our Highly Available Network Bandwidth to over 1.3 Gbps, spread over 3 redundant backbone providers that are each connected by a 1Gb fiber uplink to the Internet backbone.  With this upgrade, we are one of the highest capacity datacenters in Western New York.

This upgrade is the 2nd in three planned network upgrades for 2010.  In Q3 of this year, in anticipation of continued growth, we will be adding another Tier 1 backbone connection in order to bring even more bandwidth  to our clients, while also reducing bandwidth costs to our colocation clients.

Which Datacenter Is Right For Me? This Handy Checklist May Help:

I have been in the data center services industry for about 10 years now and I never get tired of the question…..”which data center is right for me?”.  Well, as many of you know, the answer can be an endless list of marketing blah.  But the real answer is, “what do you need from a data center?”  If your data is mission critical to your business, then the facility you should be looking for needs to be absolutely bullet-proof.  What I mean is you need to make certain that not only is the data center 100% secure and reliable, but also that you are confident the provider you have chosen has taken the necessary steps to provide true Enterprise Class data center services.  As a guide, here are some questions that you need to ask each provider when choosing a data center:  
• Do you own the building the data center is in? (I’ve seen landlords get in the way of operating efficiently)
• How long have you been in business ?(a long  and positive track record means everything)
• Do you have multiple bandwidth providers? (the more diverse providers, the more redundant)
• Do you have multiple generators? (remember, redundancy is the key)
• What type of fire suppression is installed? (remember, “dry pipe/pre-action” means  water…yikes)
• Do you have 24/7 monitoring? (someone always needs to be proactively monitoring for issues)
• Do you have 24/7 support? (Murphy’s law….make sure someone is there to assist at any time)
• What are your plans for growth? (if they are not planning for their future, do they care about yours?)
• Are you SAS70 Certified? (shouldn’t your provider put forth the extra effort/expense to insure operational excellence?)
• Do you allow 24/7 access to the data center? (it’s your stuff, you should be able to get to it when you want)
• How do you charge for power? (metered power is catching on…..pay only for what you use)
• Do you monitor PUE? (if you’re concerned with energy efficiency, shouldn’t your provider be too?)

Data Center: Too Much High Availability Bandwidth?

One of my first engineering professors was pretty old school, having earned his reputation long before the days of computer aided design, finite element analysis and precision engineering.  He was the first one to teach me about the ‘safety factor’ – something that every engineer already knows intuitively: “Take whatever you need to support the load, and triple it”.  If you were tasked with building a bridge that needed to support 200 Tons – build it to support 600 tons!

Over the past few days, I have recently been accused of ‘over-engineering’ another part of the Data Center – our Internet Backbone Providers.  While some Data Centers are comfortable having 2 connections to the backbone of the Internet, the lifeblood of our business – we added our fourth connection this week.  Yes, that is four separate Gigabit connections to four different bandwidth providers, any two of which can support the full capacity of our Data Center.

For 14 years, we have taken the uptime of our data centers and core network very seriously, learning along the way of course, though sparing no expense or effort to offer our clients the best assurance possible that their Data Center would be up to the task at hand.  We have always purchased twice the bandwidth needed by our clients, and will continue to over-engineer and reinvest in the data center to give our clients the piece of mind they need.

I wonder if that professor of 20 years ago had any idea the simple lesson taught would apply in many more ways than just designing mechanical things?