Debates over the benefits and drawbacks of walled gardens versus open ecosystems have carried on since the beginnings of the tech industry. As applied to the Internet, we don’t think there’s much to debate. There’s a reason why it’s easier today than ever before to start a company online: open standards. They’ve encouraged a flourishing of technical innovation, made the Internet faster and safer, and easier and less expensive for anyone to have an Internet presence.

Of course, not everyone likes competition. Breaking open standards — with proprietary ones — is a common way to stop competition. In the cloud industry, a more subtle way to gain power over customers and lock them in has emerged. Something that isn’t obvious at the start: high egress fees.

You probably won’t notice them when you embark on your cloud journey. And if you need to bring data into your environment, there’s no data charge. But say you want to get that data out? Or go multi-cloud, and work with another cloud provider who is best-in-class? That’s when the charges start rolling in.

To make matters worse, as the number and diversity of applications in your IT stack increases, the lock-in power of egress fees increases as well. As more data needs to travel between more applications across clouds and there is more data to move to a newer, better cloud service, the egress tax increases, further locking you in. You lose the ability to choose best-of-breed services or to negotiate prices with your provider.

This is not a better Internet. So wherever we can, we're on the lookout for ways to prevent this from happening — in this case, with our Bandwidth Alliance partners. We launched the Bandwidth Alliance in late 2018 with over fifteen cloud providers who also believe in an open Internet where data can flow freely. In short, partners in the Bandwidth Alliance have agreed to reduce egress fees for data transfer — either in their entirety or at a steep discount.

Say you're hosted in a facility in Ashburn, Virginia and a user visits your service from Sydney, Australia. There is a cost to moving the data between the two places. In this example, a cloud provider would use their own global backbone to carry the traffic across the United States and then across the Pacific, eventually handing it off to the users’ ISP. Someone has to maintain the infrastructure that hauls that traffic more than 9,000 miles from Ashburn to Sydney.

Cloudflare has more than 206 data centers globally in almost every major city. Our network automatically receives traffic at whatever data center is nearest to the user and then carries it to the data center closest to where the origin is hosted.

As part of the Bandwidth Alliance, this traffic is then delivered to the partner data center via private network interconnects (PNI) or peered connections. These PNIs typically occur within the same facility through a fiber optic cable between routers, or via a dedicated connection between two facilities at a very low cost. Unlike when there's a transit provider in between, there's no middleman, so neither Cloudflare nor our partners bear incremental costs for transferring the data over this PNI.

Cloudflare is one of the most interconnected networks in the world, peering with over 9,500 networks globally, including major ISPs, cloud providers, and enterprises. Cloudflare is connected with partners in many global regions via Private Interconnections, Internet exchanges with private peering, and via public peering.

Since its inception, the Bandwidth Alliance program has provided many customers significant benefits: both in egress cost savings and more importantly, in choice across their needs of compute, storage, and other services. Providing this choice and preventing vendor lock-in has allowed our customers to choose the right product for their use case while benefiting from significant savings.

We looked at a sample set of our customers benefiting from the Bandwidth Alliance and estimated their egress savings based on the amount of data (GB) flowing from the origin to us. We estimated the potential savings using the \$0.08/GB retail price vs. the discounted \$0.04/GB for large amounts of data transferred. Of course, customers could save more by using one of our partners with whom the cost is $0/GB. We compared the savings to the amount of money these customers spend on us. These savings are in the range of 7.5% to 27% or, in other words, for every \$1 spent on Cloudflare customers are saving up to \$0.27 — that is a no-brainer offer to take advantage of.

The Bandwidth Alliance also offers customers the option to choose a cloud that meets their price and feature requirements. For a media delivery use case, choosing the best storage provider and Cloudflare has allowed one customer to save up to 85% in storage costs. Another customer who went with a best-of-breed solution across storage and the Cloudflare global network reduced their overall cloud bill by 50%. Customers appreciate these benefits of choice:

“We were looking at moving our data from one storage provider to another, and it was a total no-brainer to use a service that was part of the Bandwidth Alliance. It really makes sense for anyone looking at any cloud service, especially one that’s pushing a lot of traffic.” — James Ross, Co-founder/CTO, Nodecraft

Earlier this month we made it even easier for our joint customers with Microsoft Azure to realize the benefits of discounted egress to Cloudflare with Microsoft Azure’s Data Transfer Routing Preference. With a few clicks on the Azure dashboard, Cloudflare customer egress bills will automatically be discounted. It’s been exciting to hear positive customer feedback:

"Before taking advantage of the Routing Preference by Azure via Cloudflare, Egress fees were one of the key reasons that restricted us from having more multi-cloud solutions since it can be high and unpredictable at times as the traffic scales. Enabling Routing Preference on the Azure dashboard was quick and easy. It was a one-and-done effort, and we get discounted Egress rates on every Azure bill.”  — Darin MacRae, Chief Architect / Cloud Computing, MyRadar.com

If you’re looking to find the right set of cloud storage, networking and security solutions to meet your needs, consider the Bandwidth Alliance as an alternative to being locked-in to a single platform. We hope it helps.

In addition, we are working with our existing partners including Microsoft Azure, Digital Ocean and several others to onboard customers and provide them the benefits of the Bandwidth Alliance. Contact us at cloudflare-bandwidth-alliance@cloudflare.com if you are interested.

Over the past year we have seen several customers take advantage of the Bandwidth Alliance and wanted to highlight two examples.

Nodecraft, which allows users an easy way to set up their own game servers, is a perfect example of how the Bandwidth Alliance helped to cut down egress costs. Nodecraft supports games like Minecraft, ARK: Survival Evolved, and Counter-Strike. As Nodecraft’s popularity increased, so did their AWS bill. They were not only being charged for storage they were using, but also for ‘egress’ or data transfer fees out of AWS. They made the decision to move their storage to Backblaze. Now they use Backblaze’s B2 Storage and Cloudflare’s extensive network to deliver content to customers without any egress charges. Read more about their journey here and here.

Pippa.io provides simple and smart solutions for podcasting, including hosting, analytics, and ads. The most important of Pippa’s business is rapid and reliable asset delivery. As Pippa grew, they were pushing millions of large audio files to listeners worldwide. This resulted in significantly increased costs, including excessive data egress fees for retrieving data from a cloud storage service such as AWS S3. DigitalOcean waives egress fees to transfer data to Cloudflare, effectively creating a zero-cost data bridge from DigitalOcean to Cloudflare’s global network. Pippa moved to DigitalOcean storage and Cloudflare’s global cloud security and delivery network. With the combination of lower cost storage and zero egress fees, Pippa saw a 50% savings on their cloud bill.

Nodecraft and Pippa are just two examples of small businesses who are seeing significant cost savings from the Bandwidth Alliance. They both chose the best storage and cloud solution for their use case and a global cloud network by Cloudflare without any taxation of transferring data between these two products. With our newly added partners we expect many more customers to benefit.

You may be asking - ‘How much can I save?’ To help you get a sense of the scale of your potential savings, by moving to the Bandwidth Alliance, we have put together a calculator. Fill in your details on egress to figure out how much you could be saving. We hope this is a helpful resource as you evaluate your cloud platform choices and spend.

At Cloudflare, our mission is to help build a better Internet. That means making the Internet faster, smarter, safer, but also more cost efficient with the help of our partners. We are always on the lookout for ways to help save customers money. With that goal we announced the Bandwidth Alliance with our founding partners during our Birthday week.

The key concept of the Bandwidth Alliance is to help reduce and in many cases waive data transfer charges, sometimes known as "bandwidth” or “egress” charges, for our mutual customers. We achieve this in partnership with the founding partners through strongly interconnected networks over peered connections. These connections typically occur within the same facility with no middleman. So, neither Cloudflare nor the cloud provider bears incremental costs. Further, we will also use our smart routing system (read details in this technical blog post) to ensure that all our customers’ traffic on participating cloud providers, once their systems are set up, qualify for this offer.

We are proud to announce the following cloud providers and hosting companies have joined the Bandwidth Alliance in committing to zero data transfer fees for mutual customers.  Below is the list of companies from whom you’ll be able to get zero data transfer fees as a Cloudflare customer. If you're hosted with any member of the Bandwidth Alliance, your data transfer fees should decrease as soon as the required technical and accounting systems are activated. Click on each partner to learn more.

We are especially excited to note the global nature of these partners, expands the Alliance and allows customers in many parts of the world to take advantage of the Alliance. The requests to join the Alliance have been significant and we are working to onboard further partners from both a technical and business perspective.  

This is an open alliance of like-minded companies and if you are a cloud provider or networking company and aren't listed, we encourage you to email cloudflare-bandwidth-alliance@cloudflare.com with a request for inclusion.

The Bandwidth Alliance is providing this benefit to all Cloudflare customers at no additional cost. Our partners provide an a wide variety of choices of cloud services and products.

We are working with our founding partners to make it even easier to use our services jointly. We are helping an initial set of customers use cloud storage with their Cloudflare service and zero data transfer fees. These customers were looking for a best of breed solution with specific storage and delivery needs. Please read this technical architecture post by Kirk Schwenkler describing the considerations in enabling such a solution.

This is a starting point and we expect to be developing many reference architectures with our partners to allow our customers to have a truly best of breed option without any concerns on transfer fees.

Here is what the joining members say:

“Open, affordable and free internet is what we strive for and what we give to our clients. Everyone and every company should have access to it. We are thrilled that the values shared by the Bandwidth Alliance can also be our values.”

Marcin Kowalski, Senior Product Manager at Data Space

"DNSnetworks is proud to become a partner in Cloudflare’s initiative for a global bandwidth alliance.  Reducing the cost of bandwidth for partners and not-for-profit businesses fits into our mission of giving back to the community that has provided us with their business and trust."

Kevin Conroy, VP Cloud Operations at DNSnetworks

“At Host1Plus we believe in long-term connections. Therefore, we simplify and personalize the customer experience for our clients to entrust their infrastructure to us. By joining this alliance, we empower our customers to scale their businesses easily across the globe. We look forward to working together with the Bandwidth Alliance and offer the fastest connections to Host1Plus and Cloudflare customers”

Vincentas Grinius, CEO & Founder at Host1Plus

"At Vultr, we strive to provide the most predictable cloud platform to all of our customers. Joining the Bandwidth Alliance, in partnership with Cloudflare, furthers our vision by being able to provide zero egress to our mutual customers."

David Aninowsky, Founder/CEO at Vultr

"In March of 2018, Wasabi pioneered the cloud storage industry’s first ‘unlimited free egress’ pricing plan. We are excited to join forces with Cloudflare and the Bandwidth Alliance, validating that the early business models of Cloud 1.0 vendors no longer applies in a world that expects unlimited everything. This partnership is another way of slingshotting our mutual customers into a future that is already here today."

David Friend, CEO and co-founder at Wasabi