Amazon and Google Enticing Customers With Cheap Storage, But Beware Of Egress Charges

If you are looking for cheap storage in the cloud, Amazon and Google offer some of the lowest prices around. On large deals, Google is going down to $0.025 per GB and Amazon’s S3 service is as low as $0.0275. But for content owners that are using Google and Amazon’s storage as origin, and then having another third-party CDN pull from it, they are getting hit with egress charges that in many cases, no longer make Amazon and Google the cheapest for storage.

On some deals I am seeing, the content owner would do better by using the same CDN they are using to deliver the content, store their content as well. In the U.S. and Europe, Amazon charges $0.02 per GB for regional data transfer out. So content owners can be hit with big egress charges each month, all while being lured in by cheap storage pricing. And with most major third-party CDNs charging between $0.07 – $0.10 per GB stored on large volume deals, adding in egress fees to Amazon and Google’s storage pricing actually makes them more expensive than some CDNs.

Amazon and Google won’t always be more expensive for every customer, but some haven’t run the math to factor in just how quickly egress charges can add up. When comparing storage costs amongst all cloud and CDN providers, make sure you don’t underestimate how much the monthly egress charges can add to your bill each month.

If you want to get more details on the latest storage and CDN market pricing, I will present my market pricing data on May 9th, at the Content Delivery Summit in NYC. Use code 200DR16 for a discount on your pass.