whats the logic behind their data pricing structure?
Outbound bandwidth fees are essentially a form of "exit tax" that makes it more costly to use resources outside the cloud (like other clouds). It's there to lock you into your current cloud's ecosystem even if the grass is greener elsewhere.
Moving data around is already a lot harder than moving other resources (like compute). The bandwidth fees also add a monetary cost to such moves.
As for the pricing reason, part of it is reliability, but part is that all of the other product offerings (which are available at the big players and not elsewhere) are subsidized by these costs that everyone needs. For example, Amazon Cognito is dirt cheap, why do you think that is? Come for the X, Y, Z and make us money back through storage/egress.
the cynical part of me agrees though that making moving out difficult/expensive is a large part of why too. Probably some combination of both
Most of the cloud customers are using it to serve data more than receiving data. Meanwhile, the cloud providers are connected to the Internet via mostly symmetrical links. This means that they are underutilized in the upload direction, and loaded in the download direction. So they charge more in the direction where there is demand.
Download traffic is not the only one that is costly. Traffic between their datacenters from different regions may be billed as well.
Check Hetzner, OVH, or Scaleway too.
