Take serverloft as an example - not a low-cost provider. With your 99$/month server with a 1gps uplink you get "flat bandwidth":
"Fair Use Policy
Use as much bandwidth as required: With all dedicated servers from serverloft, you receive a traffic flat rate free of charge. Here our Fair Use Policy applies, which requires a fair usage of all our resources as well as a reasonable traffic usage.
Therefore, in case the bandwidth exceeds 50 TB on a 1 Gbit/s server during the current billing month, we will decrease the bandwidth to 100 Mbit/s.
You will be able to monitor you current usage in the customer panel. We will also inform you via e-mail should you approach the 50 TB maximum usage. In this case you can purchase additional bandwidth for $10 per TB in order to extend your traffic usage."
So, 99 for the server and 50TB a month. Now if you want to max out your 1gpbs connection, lets say 50% of max (1gbps * 24 * 30 * 60 * 60s/2 TB ~ 160 TB, or a additional commitment of 110 * 10 = 1100+99 = grand total of 1200 dollars a month. How much transfer does that get you out of s3? First off, 160TB out of S3 each month, clocks in at 13227$ for just the bandwidth - not including the any storage. For the price of 160TB on dedicated, you get approximately 12TB on s3 (again without storage).
120TB out from cloudfront? 25693/month.
Now, one, low-end box might not be enough to keep everything going, but notice the price difference here. If you bought four "low-end" boxes you'd get 200TB of bandwidth included, and still be paying a lot less than for just the bandwidth on S3. It might even be cheaper to rent dedicated boxes set up as caching proxies, than to serve your data from s3/cloud-front...
Now, I'm not saying the cloud doesn't have merit, but just pointing out that the price difference is real.
Indeed :-) I just felt the need to go and look at some current numbers, from a more expensive host than what I currently use (happy hetzner customer here).
"Fair Use Policy
Use as much bandwidth as required: With all dedicated servers from serverloft, you receive a traffic flat rate free of charge. Here our Fair Use Policy applies, which requires a fair usage of all our resources as well as a reasonable traffic usage.
Therefore, in case the bandwidth exceeds 50 TB on a 1 Gbit/s server during the current billing month, we will decrease the bandwidth to 100 Mbit/s.
You will be able to monitor you current usage in the customer panel. We will also inform you via e-mail should you approach the 50 TB maximum usage. In this case you can purchase additional bandwidth for $10 per TB in order to extend your traffic usage."
So, 99 for the server and 50TB a month. Now if you want to max out your 1gpbs connection, lets say 50% of max (1gbps * 24 * 30 * 60 * 60s/2 TB ~ 160 TB, or a additional commitment of 110 * 10 = 1100+99 = grand total of 1200 dollars a month. How much transfer does that get you out of s3? First off, 160TB out of S3 each month, clocks in at 13227$ for just the bandwidth - not including the any storage. For the price of 160TB on dedicated, you get approximately 12TB on s3 (again without storage).
120TB out from cloudfront? 25693/month.
Now, one, low-end box might not be enough to keep everything going, but notice the price difference here. If you bought four "low-end" boxes you'd get 200TB of bandwidth included, and still be paying a lot less than for just the bandwidth on S3. It might even be cheaper to rent dedicated boxes set up as caching proxies, than to serve your data from s3/cloud-front...
Now, I'm not saying the cloud doesn't have merit, but just pointing out that the price difference is real.