Does AWS Charge for Bandwidth?

AWS charges hourly prices by bandwidth for outbound data transfers. Bandwidth costs are substantial for network-intensive workloads, such as web crawling, IoT, real-time communication, audio and video streaming, and gaming. These processes make up the majority of your cloud computing costs.

However, data transfers between EC2 and alternative AWS do not incur any costs. For instance, you don’t incur any costs for data transfers between EC2 and S3.

Amazon CloudFront allows up to 50GB of outbound data transfer. You can view your bandwidth costs through the nOps Cost Cloud Optimization tool. nOps gives you better visibility into your costs and spending, allowing you to tame costs.

AWS data transfer costs fluctuate depending on the region. Each AWS region has a data transfer fee within and outside the region. Data transfers between two regions cost more than within the region. Also, data transfers from one Availability Zone to another are costlier than transfers within an Availability Zone.

The region determines how much data transfers to the Internet cost. The costs are tiered.

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Users also incur costs when using Public/Elastic IP addresses. An Elastic IP does not change even in the event of termination. When communicating using an Elastic or Public IP inside the EC2 network, users incur regional data transfer fees. It doesn’t matter if the instances are in the same Availability Zone.

Elastic IP addresses charge by bandwidth at an hourly rate of $0.01 per hour. 

However, you will not incur charges in the following circumstances:

• If there is an association between your Elastic IP address and an instance
• If you have reserved your Elastic IP address

How Can You Reduce AWS Bandwidth Charges?

AWS bandwidth charges are costly. Some of the best ways to reduce these charges include:

• Using private IP addresses. Private IP addresses are less costly than Elastic/Public IP addresses. 

• Keep data transfers within a single region. To transfer data outside, consider the region with the lowest transfer fees. 

• Cache data before transferring. Caching and compressing data before transfers makes it possible to save on costs. It’s best to cache your S3 for faster delivery of your assets.

Amazon CloudFront

When transferring data to Internet users, it’s best to consider Amazon CloudFront. Transfers on this network up to 50GB are less expensive than from other AWS regions.

Use nOps to Reduce AWS Bandwidth Costs

The best way to reduce bandwidth charges is to observe the services that incur high transfer costs. You can then alter these services in a way that minimizes data transfer along costly routes. It’s best to operate with private IP addresses since they cost less.

At nOps, we provide a cloud cost optimization tool to ensure you can save on costs as much as possible. With nOps, you can easily estimate your AWS spending, compare costs per region and budget for your data transfers. This tool also allows you to launch billing alerts that let you know when the billing surpasses the threshold.

Start your nOps free trial today!