Tips for Reducing Data Transfer Costs in your AWS Bill

Although AWS provides multiple cloud services and pricing model, it is you who have to choose the right service for your organization. And you may end up in complex and complicated cloud bills, for example, data transfer prices constitute up to 30% of the total bill.

It would be easier to understand the AWS cloud bill if you are running one or two services by quickly recalling their respective pricing model. But if your organization is big enough to run multiple AWS cloud services simultaneously, then the estimation of cloud cost can be shocking to those who are new to AWS and sometimes even for the advanced users. Whatever the case is, it still needs to be fine-tuned for reducing Data Transfer costs.

The key to reducing data transfer costs is to study and understand the data transfer costs for each service and how they are linked with other services.

What does AWS Data Transfer cost mean?

The data transfer price of AWS varies depending on the amount of data transferring in and out, to and from an AWS cloud service. Data transfer prices are applicable for transferring data into one service from another AWS service and charged for transferring data out of the service to another one.

The important factor to understand is that AWS data transfer prices vary based on the different regions. What does this mean? It simply means that different regions have different pricing model for data transfer in AWS.

How Data Transfer affects your AWS cloud bill?

If the data transfer is between the regions, the data transfer cost that is incurred will be high compared to data transfer price between two different availability zones. And the data transfer between different availability zones (AZ) is high compared to data transfer within the same availability zone (AZ).

Thus we can conclude that the data transfer in the same AZ incurs the lowest cost and data transfer between two regions incurs the highest cost.

While the data transfer charges for data coming to EC2 is free, you’ll have to pay for the outbound transfer. This confuses most of the customers who are new to AWS, leading them to fall into the “unawareness” trap. Generally, data transfer out from Amazon EC2 instance to the internet incurs significant costs and these costs can swiftly grow and keep on adding to your monthly bills.
If any re-hosted applications are not configured or aligned with AWS features, they are more liable to incur high data transfer costs. They should be re-architected to make sure that data transfers are completed through the cheapest route possible.
Organizations leveraging the benefits of Hybrid Cloud need to take some time and give a thought on their on-premise data centers. The communication between the on-premises data center and the cloud can cause huge spikes resulting in high monthly AWS bill.

Reduce Data Transfer cost in AWS

The AWS data transfer price depends on the architecture of your environment in the cloud and how the data flows along the inexpensive routes.

Choose reasonable regions:
No matter how many AWS services you have currently subscribed to, the data transfer cost is always expensive across regions. The best practice is to reduce the number of regions where your data flows.

If you rearchitect your cloud environment so that the data transfer is happening between different availability zones within a region, the cost incurred is much less compared to between regions. Similarly, if you architect the cloud environment to transfer data in the same availability zone the data transfer cost reduces drastically. Work out a way by rearchitecting to keep the data transfer cost minimum.

Follow the below table which shows the costs to transfer up to 40 TB of data OUT from EC2 to the Internet from each Region:

<table>

<tbody>

<tr>

<h3>AWS Regions</h3>

</td>

<h3>Cost of Transferring Next 40 TB of Data OUT from EC2 to the Internet (per month)</h3>

</td>

</tr>

<tr>

<td width="319">South America (Sao Paulo)</td>

</tr>

<tr>

<td width="319">US East (N. Virginia)</td>

</tr>

<tr>

</tr>

<tr>

<td width="319">US West (Oregon)</td>

</tr>

<tr>

<td width="319">Asia Pacific (Mumbai)</td>

</tr>

<tr>

<td width="319">Asia Pacific (Singapore)</td>

</tr>

<tr>

<td width="319">EU (Frankfurt)</td>

</tr>

<tr>

<td width="319">EU (London)</td>

</tr>

<tr>

<td width="319">AWS GovCloud (US)</td>

</tr>

<tr>

<td width="319">Asia Pacific (Seoul)</td>

</tr>

<tr>

<td width="319">Asia Pacific (Sydney)</td>

</tr>

<tr>

<td width="319">Asia Pacific (Tokyo)</td>

</tr>

</tbody>

</table>

Further Data Transfer Savings:

The type of IP address used also affects the data transfer price and could contribute a hefty monthly AWS bill. Data transfer cost is higher when data is transferred using a public IP or Elastic IP address than using a private IP. This fact is often ignored.

Hence, if your architecture allows you to transfer data via private IP address rather than public IP do not hesitate to implement it as this will save a considerable amount of savings.

Also compressing and caching the data before transferring it can significantly save the cost. Along with Private IP address enable caching at your origin servers or S3 for CloudFront edge locations to accelerate delivery of your websites, APIs, video content or other web assets. To ensure cost saving on data transfer enable compression of both dynamic and static content. Make sure to automate server-side compression and client-side caching after deploying in your release automation cycle.

This way you can reduce the cost of data transfer in your AWS Cloud environment. Interpole is the standard AWS partner where we offer AWS managed services.

About InterPole

InterPole was established in 1996 and has been engaged in web hosting, email, and management of IT infrastructure. InterPole pioneered with Virtual Private Servers in 2004 and Cloud Hosting in 2008. Over the years, InterPole has worked with over 6200 mid-sized businesses and startups, and have assisted them in their journey towards the adoption of modern technologies through the Internet. InterPole is a Standard Consulting Partner of Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. With this partnership, provides Managed AWS service and maintains a team of engineers who are trained and certified for the specific cloud platforms. These benefits companies in defining their cloud strategy and making a well-planned journey, reliably and cost-effectively.