Let's say you pay a lot for some cloud provider and you find out that your app is best and cheapest served by a good ol' regular webhosting provider. Please, in that case, make sure you leave your money and data at independent webhosts. There's a trend going on - at least in Europe - of consolidating smaller webhosts into big players, under the guidance of some big groups (private equity?). They quickly raise their prices by 100's of percents.
I experienced this a couple of times with different webhosts (in the Netherlands) over the last three to four years. Very recently my monthly bill at one of them went up from around 3,- to around 18,-.
Whenever I read about 'egress costs' I usually laugh about that because I don't even understand it; my data is my data, why pay to get it off your hard drive!? But for some time I'm also seeing dark clouds for my own use cases. I don't find it hard to believe anymore that webhost after webhost is consolidating, trying to play AWS, upping the prices a lot, and finally... also establishing egress costs!??
Yeah wow huh. I had my wife’s food blog (wordpress) hosted at a Dutch provider called Neostrada. I think it was something like 50 euros per year at the start. They got bought, sent around emails with sleazy wording like “we’re upgrading your plan to fit our new pricing scheme” and then within ~2 years I ended up owing them 450 euros a year. I’ve never cancelled anything this quickly before.
A 9x price hike in just a few years has got to be the least scrupulous PE move I’ve ever witnessed in NL. I agree with your prediction that it’s just a matter of time before they tack on exorbitant egress fees.
If you believe that egress prices are fake and pure profit, I encourage you (or someone else reading this with the same belief) to try running your own independent web hosting service ;)
I think what you will discover is that network bandwidth is a finite resource you have to pay for and ration out to your customers, and that the easiest way to finitize and ration something your customers expect (errantly) to be infinite is to charge for it, and charge exactly that price that will cap demand!
I experienced this a couple of times with different webhosts (in the Netherlands) over the last three to four years. Very recently my monthly bill at one of them went up from around 3,- to around 18,-.
Whenever I read about 'egress costs' I usually laugh about that because I don't even understand it; my data is my data, why pay to get it off your hard drive!? But for some time I'm also seeing dark clouds for my own use cases. I don't find it hard to believe anymore that webhost after webhost is consolidating, trying to play AWS, upping the prices a lot, and finally... also establishing egress costs!??