AWS Introduced Flat-Rate Pricing… But It Changes Nothing for SMB Infrastructure (Here’s Why Private Cloud Still Wins)
- Scott Pagel
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
When AWS announced its new flat-rate, no-overage CloudFront pricing plans, the headlines made it sound like they’d finally solved the problem of unpredictable cloud bills. For SMBs running real workloads, though, this move changes much less than the marketing suggests.
What AWS improved is pricing at the edge — CDN, DNS, and security services bundled into a predictable monthly plan. What they didn’t touch is the messy, variable cost structure of the underlying infrastructure your business actually runs on.
This article breaks down what AWS really launched, why it doesn’t fix the core issues for SMB infrastructure, and why private cloud with SafeStorz still offers stronger predictability, performance, and resilience.
What AWS Actually Changed (and What They Didn’t)
AWS rolled out four flat-rate “Edge plans” for Amazon CloudFront to eliminate surprise overage billing on website and application delivery:
- Free ($0/month)
- Pro ($15/month)
- Business ($200/month)
- Premium ($1,000/month)
Each plan bundles CloudFront CDN, AWS WAF, DDoS protection, Amazon Route 53 DNS, CloudWatch log ingestion, TLS certificates, limited serverless edge compute, and monthly S3 storage credits. If you exceed a plan’s usage allowances, you aren’t billed extra — instead, your performance can be throttled.
You can see AWS’s own description here and the technical breakdown in the CloudFront Developer Guide.
SafeStorz vs AWS: The Difference Is Everything
AWS’s narrative is simple: flat-rate CDN + security = predictable cloud.
But most SMBs don’t live and die by their CDN bill. They live and die by:
- VM performance and availability
- Storage throughput and latency
- Database stability
- Backup and disaster recovery reliability
- Security posture and monitoring
- Real, responsive support when something breaks
AWS’s new pricing model improves predictability at the edge, but leaves the core infrastructure bill — EC2, EBS, RDS, NAT gateways, inter-AZ traffic, S3 beyond bundled credits, VPC endpoints, CloudWatch, and more — just as complex and variable as before.
SafeStorz, by contrast, offers predictable, private-cloud hosting designed for ERP and other critical SMB workloads, where compute, storage, backups, monitoring, and support are packaged into a clear monthly price.
1. AWS Solved Predictability at the Edge — SafeStorz Solved It for the Entire Stack
CloudFront is not your infrastructure. It is a distribution and security layer that sits in front of your applications.
Your business actually depends on:
- Consistent VM performance
- Storage and database I/O
- RTO/RPO targets for backup and recovery
- Stable, low-latency connectivity for users and integrations
- The ability to run test, migration, and DR environments without financial whiplash
AWS still charges separately (and variably) for EC2, EBS, RDS, NAT gateway data, inter-region and inter-AZ traffic, S3 beyond small credits, CloudWatch metrics and logs, VPC endpoints, and more. None of that is covered by the new flat-rate edge plans.
If you want a deeper dive into why full-stack predictability matters more than headline pricing, see these SafeStorz posts:
2. AWS Still Has Noisy Neighbors. SafeStorz Never Does.
Public cloud infrastructure is multi-tenant at a massive scale. Your workloads share physical resources with thousands of others. Even with modern isolation, noisy-neighbor effects and resource contention are a persistent risk.
SafeStorz private cloud is built on dedicated compute and storage carved out for your environment. That means:
- No unknown workloads competing with your ERP or database
- Tuning for your specific stack instead of generic templates
- More consistent performance profiles and fewer surprise slowdowns
For more context on how noisy-neighbor patterns have shown up in hyperscale environments over the years, you can browse historical coverage here.
3. AWS’s Flat-Rate Plans Can Throttle You — SafeStorz Doesn’t
AWS’s flat-rate plans convert “bill shock” into “performance shock.” Exceed the published allowances, and AWS reserves the right to degrade performance rather than charge you more.
That might be acceptable for a marketing microsite. It is far less acceptable for an order management system, financial platform, or ERP stack.
SafeStorz never throttles customers based on arbitrary traffic caps. Your performance is tied to the resources you’ve actually reserved — and we’ll tell you clearly when it’s time to scale those resources up or out.
4. Hyperscale Outages Don’t Disappear Because Pricing Got Prettier
Recent weeks have highlighted just how fragile large, shared platforms can be:
- Cloudflare suffered a major outage on November 18, 2025 that briefly took down or degraded access to services like ChatGPT, X, Uber, and many others. Cloudflare’s own postmortem is here.
- Microsoft Azure experienced a global disruption on October 29, 2025 related to Azure Front Door, impacting Azure, Microsoft 365, and downstream services worldwide. You can see details and timing in Microsoft’s status history.
- AWS itself has had multiple significant outages, including DNS-related incidents in October 2025 that knocked major applications offline. Reuters’ coverage gives a concise overview.
Each of these events underscores the same point: when you put all of your infrastructure eggs in a single hyperscale basket, their bad day becomes your bad day.
SafeStorz private cloud is engineered differently. We pair private infrastructure in partner data centers with our own snapshotting and replication strategy so that your workloads are insulated from the blast radius of global public-cloud incidents.
5. AWS’s Flat-Rate Story Is Marketing. SafeStorz’s Is Operational Reality.
AWS’s flat-rate plans bundle a specific set of edge services into a simple price. They do not bundle:
- VM hosting
- Database services
- Full backup and DR workflows
- Security incident response and tuning
- Endpoint protection
- Ongoing monitoring and capacity planning
- Actual human support that knows your environment
SafeStorz’s private-cloud model is built around those fundamentals. We use tools like Cynet XDR to provide advanced detection and response, and PRTG for deep, customized monitoring across your environment. You can read more about how we leverage AI-driven security here.
6. Why AWS Launched These Plans (and What It Signals)
AWS rarely changes pricing strategy without competitive pressure. Flat-rate CloudFront plans are a response to:
- Growing competition from providers like Cloudflare and other CDNs on simplicity and predictability
- Customer frustration with unpredictable egress and security add-on pricing
- The perception that hyperscale cloud has become too risky and too expensive for certain classes of workloads
In other words, AWS is trying to close the gap on one of private cloud’s biggest psychological advantages: predictable bills.
But because they’ve only tackled the edge, not the core, the underlying story hasn’t changed. For SMBs running critical workloads, predictable, right-sized private cloud infrastructure is still the more stable foundation.
SafeStorz Resilience in a Week of Cloud Outages (Breakout Box)
During the recent wave of hyperscaler and CDN outages, SafeStorz-hosted customers stayed online.
When Cloudflare’s November 18, 2025 outage disrupted access to major services, SafeStorz’s private-cloud stacks kept running. Our largest hosted logistics customer continued operating global shipments with a fully functioning infrastructure stack while public-cloud–dependent peers were scrambling.
That’s the core difference: our customers aren’t waiting on a global vendor’s status page to turn green again. Their infrastructure is already up.
“AWS fixed pricing at the edge. SafeStorz fixed predictability at the foundation — where your business actually runs.”
The Bottom Line for SMBs
AWS’s flat-rate CloudFront plans will generate headlines and might genuinely help teams who only needed simpler CDN and edge-security pricing.
For SMBs running core business systems, though, the essentials haven’t changed:
- You still need predictable infrastructure costs, not just predictable CDN bills.
- You still need isolation from noisy neighbors and global platform failures.
- You still need human, accountable support from a partner who knows your environment.
That is exactly what SafeStorz private cloud is built to deliver.
To explore whether shifting workloads from public cloud to private cloud makes sense for your organization, you can browse the full SafeStorz blog here or reach out to talk through your specific environment.
