We started the Bandwidth Alliance in 2018 with a group of like-minded cloud and networking partners. Our common goal was to help our mutual customers reduce or eliminate data transfer charges, sometimes known as "bandwidth” or “egress” fees, between the cloud and the consumer. By reducing or eliminating these costs, our customers can more easily choose a best of breed set of solutions because they don’t have to worry about data charges from moving workloads between vendors, and thereby becoming locked-in to a single provider for all their needs. Today we’re announcing an important milestone: the addition of Alibaba, Zenlayer, and Cherry Servers to the Bandwidth Alliance, expanding it to a total of 20 partners. These partners offer our customers a wide choice of cloud services and products each suited to different needs.
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.
Customer savings
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.
What could your savings be?
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.