Navigating the intricate world of hyperscaler cloud billing has become an exercise in scrutinising the fine print. Cloud users have been tuned into the recent industry moves where public cloud giants—Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure—announced the apparent scrapping of their egress fees, aiming for an appearance of customer-centric strategy.
However, this overhaul, upon closer inspection, shows that there are still significant strings attached, limiting data transfer and interoperability. As organisations generate growing volumes of data, the need for cost effective storage that aligns with your business becomes paramount. Colocation services offered by data centre providers can significantly reduce costs for organisations, especially around egress fees.
The devil is in the detail
While the headlines from the hyperscaler announcements may give the impression of egress fees being removed, this is far from the practical reality. As always, the devil is in the details.
There are still significant strings attached to removing data from a big tech public cloud service. Azure and Google Cloud have removed the charges for data transfer, but only for customers who leave their service entirely, and close their accounts. This may sound reasonable, but what if you only wanted to move 20% of your data to a different provider because it's better at running a certain workload? You're left between a rock and a hard place, with neither option being optimal.
AWS doesn't have the same conditions as its competitors but does have a long and convoluted approval process for data egress to take place. All data transfers over 100 TB per month require sign-off from Amazon support to qualify for 0 egress fees, to verify “if the data transferred out to the internet is a normal part of your business or a one-time transfer as part of a switch to another cloud provider or on premises”. The more loopholes a customer has to jump through, the less likely it is that a fairly priced data transfer can be achieved.
Egress fees have long been a contentious point of the cloud contract, with end users continuously being charged with exorbitant and sometimes even surprise fees when choosing to move their data to a more suitable location. While due to regulatory pressures, the hyperscalers have appeared to address this vendor lock, for the majority of customers there are still significant and possibly insurmountable hurdles to an equitable data hosting stack.
Enter ServerChoice
At ServerChoice, we've always been a champion of transparency and freedom in data mobility. Many of our customers are people coming back to colocation from the broken promises of the cloud, for more control and oversight of their data and service. As colocation specialists, we offer a range of services for businesses looking to reclaim their control over data movement while maintaining high quality hosting.
We can help move your hardware to a new location, offer a 30 day no strings attached cooling off period to new customers, as well as lightning-fast network connectivity solutions to a range of different services straight from your rack.
