AWS Data Transfer Cost

Data Transfer Costs:

Before we begin you may want to try our advanced data transfer calculator

AWS Data Transfer Calculator

AWS charges if data is transferred to the internet or between AWS services, regions or Availability zones. Private or public IP or even transferring data to Amazon CloudFront and distributing from them will also effect overall cost structure.

Data is the most valuable asset a company possesses. By using the cloud, you will boost the flexibility and mobility of that data to get an enhanced value. The cloud makes it simple to transfer data wherever you want and whenever you want. However, this transfer of data is going to cost money, and aws data transfer costs are going to keep adding up at a quick pace.

What Are They?

They are the costs that AWS charges in order to transfer data in 2 ways:

Between AWS and the Internet
Within AWS, between services, like EC2 or S3

-Some AWS services account for the cost of moving data in or out as part of the cost of the service itself and are not billed separately.

-There might not be a distinct data transfer cost in either direction, like with AWS Kinesis.

-There might be a distinct cost to move data one way (in or out), but no cost for the other way, like transferring to and from S3 across distinct regions.

-There might also be a cost to transfer data both in and out, like transferring across EC2 instances in distinct availability zones.

This means that controlling data transfer costs is knowing the exact path your data is going to take while moving around.

Data transfer: Between AWS and the Internet

When transferring data from AWS to the internet, the costs will highly be dependent on the region.

-S3 buckets found in US West (Oregon) region:

The first GB per month for free, and the next 9.999 TB per month will cost $0.09 per GB.

Yet, when S3 buckets are located in South America (São Paolo) region:

The first GB per month is still for free, but the next 9.999 TB per month will cost $0.25 per GB.

Data transfer: Within AWS

Data can be transferred across regions or within one region when transferring within AWS.

Data transfer across regions

Same cost structure as that of transferring data between AWS and the internet.

Costs depend on the region as well, but transfer into one region from any different region is free of charge.

This means you only pay for the outbound transfer of the originating region and not for the inbound transfer in the target region.

Data transfer within regions

Data transferred between AWS services in a specific region will cost differently by depending on whether data is transferred within or across Availability Zones.

Free data transfers when:

Within the same region,
Within the same availability zone
Using a private IP address

Data that is transferred within the same region but in distinct availability zones will get a cost associated with it.

Cost-Saving Tips:

Plan Your Route

The highest costs are for transferring data between regions.

Second-highest costs are the ones accompanied by the transfer of data between Availability Zones in a specific region.

The lower costs are those of data transfer in a single Availability Zone.

You should reduce data transfer costs by creating an infrastructure that allows data to flow along the least expensive routes.

Lessen traffic across regions and Availability Zones.

Raise traffic that remains in an Availability Zone or, in one region at least.

When not relying on a specific region, check a few of them to see which one of them offers the most cost savings.

Use Private IP Addresses

Data transferring costs are higher with public IP or Elastic IP addresses than with a private address when working across the board.

Utilizing private IP addresses at constant times can help in reducing costs.

Try Amazon CloudFront

It’s a widespread Content Delivery Network service.

It costs nothing to transfer data from EC2 to Amazon CloudFront.

When you intend on transferring high volumes of data to the users, like videos, images and audio, CloudFront will be beneficial by keeping those data transfer costs down.

Pricing for transferring data from CloudFront to the internet depends on Region & Amount of Data.

Check out a couple of options:

Regional Data Transfer Out to Internet (per GB)

Per Month	United States & Canada	Europe	South Africa & Middle East	Japan	Australia	Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, & Philippines	India	South America
First 10TB	$0.085	$0.085	$0.110	$0.114	$0.114	$0.140	$0.170	$0.250
Next 40TB	$0.080	$0.080	$0.105	$0.089	$0.098	$0.135	$0.130	$0.200
Next 100TB	$0.060	$0.060	$0.090	$0.086	$0.094	$0.120	$0.110	$0.180

Try AWS Simple Monthly Calculator

Experiment with various configurations in order to see how to save money as much as possible.

Directly check out which variables are capable of impacting your costs.

Choose which resource you wish to use, like EC2 or S3, put your required region, and check the Data Transfer section to know what to consider.

Add random values you want to check so that you get a sense of how the costs will be.

EC2 and S3 Costs

They are the widely-used AWS services. So, let’s find out what comes free and what doesn’t.

EC2

In the same region, no data transfer cost need when moving data out of EC2 to:

-Amazon SES

-Amazon SQS

-Amazon SimpleDB

-Amazon S3

-Amazon Glacier

-Amazon DynamoDB

In the same Availability Zone, no data transfer cost needed when moving data to the following:

-Amazon ElastiCache instances

-Amazon Elastic Load Balancing

-Amazon RDS

-Amazon Redshift

-Elastic Network Interfaces

No matter the region or Availability Zone, there’s no cost to transfer data to CloudFront or when using a private IP address. Any data transfer IN to Amazon EC2 from the internet is totally free.

S3

-Data transfer IN to S3 from the internet: Free.

-Data transfer OUT to CloudFront: Free.

-Everything else: Specific costs.

-S3 data transfer acceleration options: Extra costs.

-Pricing depends on AWS Edge Location used in order to accelerate data transfer.

Data Transfer: IN – to Amazon S3 from the Internet:

Accelerated by AWS Edge Locations in the United States/Europe and Japan	$0.04/GB
Accelerated by all other AWS Edge Locations	$0.08/GB

Data Transfer: OUT – from Amazon S3 to the Internet:

Accelerated by any AWS Edge Location

$0.04/GB

Monitor Data Transfer Costs

As you gain more knowledge about your AWS data transfer costs, you’ll get better at taking control of it.

You should know what you’re spending and how you can be cost-efficient without losing any control the cloud provides you with.

That’s the reason for needing a cloud cost management platform. Using its wide variety of capabilities, everyone using it can work together to save money and increase efficiency.

When you wish to control your data transfer costs, then you require visibility over costs and data analysis reports that offer you actionable insights.

It’s unfair to say that AWS data transfer costs are designed to be opaque and confusing. It is, however, probably very fair to say that AWS data transfer costs can easily get businesses in a muddle. The good news is that if you understand the underlying principles, you can usually work out what you need to do to tame them. Here is a quick guide to what you need to know.

Taming AWS data transfer costs starts with building the right infrastructure

At the risk of stating the extremely obvious, the best way to tame your AWS data transfer costs is to minimize both the amount of data you transfer and the distance over which you transfer it.

While this is a very straightforward principle, the nature of the cloud can make it something of a challenge to implement in practice, especially if you take a piecemeal approach to developing your cloud infrastructure.

Quite simply, if there is a corporate culture of “just adding bits here and there” as the perceived need or want arises, then there is a very good chance you’re quickly going to end up with cloud infrastructure which is all over the place and that’s even before you consider the distinct possibility that infrastructure will be left active long after it has ceased to be needed (if it was ever really needed at all).

In short, do whatever you need to do to ensure that your AWS cloud infrastructure is developed in a considered manner rather than just thrown together.

Importing data from the internet is usually either free or very affordable

You’re probably not going to have a great deal of flexibility with regards to how much data you import from the internet, but the good news is that importing it into the headline AWS services (e.g. EC2 instances, RDS instances, S3 storage) is either free or very affordable.

The cost of exporting data to the internet can vary greatly depending on the region

AWS regions are an interesting topic. On the one hand, compliance reasons may limit your options. On the other hand, even considering compliance, there may be some room to maneuver and if there is, it’s worth considering whether or not you could use this to your advantage.

For example, even if compliance reasons require you to keep data in the U.S. then you still have four regions from which to choose, likewise if you need to keep it in the EU, you have four/five regions from which to choose (London is due to exit the EU shortly).

You may even want to consider using different regions for different purposes. For example, you could use your nearest region when you want to minimize latency and a more economical region when you’re happy to wait a bit longer for your tasks to complete if it means a lower cost.

Transferring data between services is where life can get complicated

This is the part where you really need to read the fine print. As a rule of thumb, you will get free AWS data transfers within an Availability Zone and it is very likely (although not completely guaranteed) that you will get free AWS data transfers within a region. With some services, however you can get free data transfers within a region for certain operations but not for others. For example, backup, restore, load, and unload operations between Amazon Redshift and Amazon S3 are all free (within the same region) but other operations are chargeable.

Why AWS data transfer costs can still end up being higher than you think they should

Assuming you have sorted out your cloud infrastructure properly so that data is flowing the way it should, then the likeliest reason why your AWS data transfer costs are escalating more than you think they should is because you are transferring more data than you realize.

The question then becomes whether or not you will just have to live with this or whether you can adjust the behavior of your application to reduce the costs without excessive negative impact on the user experience.

For example, let’s say you have an application which regularly requests large quantities of data from S3. If this app is an essential, customer-facing app which needs to work at maximum speed, then you may just have to live with this and swallow the cost.

If it’s not, however, then you could look at reducing the number of requests it makes (assuming that the amount of data transferred per request stays the same instead of increasing to compensate for the fact that the number of requests has been reduced). Alternatively, you might want to see if you could live with slower storage, such as Amazon Glacier, which can actually work a whole lot more quickly than its name might suggest.

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