AWS’s Egregious Egress

The article discusses the pricing model of Amazon Web Services (AWS) for data transfer, also known as bandwidth or egress fees. It explains that while AWS initially improved flexibility and scalability in web hosting services, its pricing model has been criticized for being opaque and disadvantageous to customers. The author compares AWS's charging based on "stocks" (the amount of data delivered) with the industry standard of paying for "flows" (network capacity). They argue that this discrepancy leads to significant markups in egress fees, which have not decreased proportionally to falling wholesale bandwidth prices. The article also highlights AWS's refusal to join the Bandwidth Alliance and its resistance to passing on savings from peering with other networks to customers. It concludes by expressing hope that AWS will reconsider its pricing model and join the majority of the hosting industry in offering more equitable fees for data transfer.