Empowering customers with the Bandwidth Alliance

High Egress Fees

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 Continue reading

The Bandwidth Alliance Charges Forward with New Partners – Alibaba, Zenlayer, and Cherry Servers

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 [email protected] 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 Continue reading

Expanding the Bandwidth Alliance: sharing the benefits of interconnected networks

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.

Expanding the Alliance: new Partners Committed to Discounting Data Transfer Fees

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 Continue reading