Image hosting community site - notably without shady popup/layer/scam ads, which probably was the reason for the relatively small income. For a two person team that only worked part time on it, it still made good money.

The total dataset was just about 3TB, so storing it was not an issue.

I see.

It does make sense. Thanks for satisfying my curiosity :)

700TB/mo is about 2Gbps - on the open market that should be under $1000/mo. Netflix's total cost is probably below $0.25/Mbps. $56,000/mo would get you over 100Gbps of committed capacity from any major provider (or a mix).

> 700TB/mo is about 2Gbps - on the open market that should be under $1000/mo

Is that a fixed-cost sustained pipe though? I was under the impression that (at least at the backbone level) those contracts got more costly the closer to full that your pipe was.

Yes, $1000/mo would get you a 2Gbps commit on a 10Gbps pipe. If you used over 2Gbps (95%ile) for the month, you would pay probably $0.60/Mbps for that excess ($0.10 over the commit price). Some providers dont charge more than the commit price for overage traffic.

Interesting data. Thanks!

It's obvious that I had no idea about costs. I honestly thought it would be much more expensive.

Why is it "not have 56k for operating expenses"? Something that can be had for $2k is not something a healthy business spends $56k on. You should be able to find a better use for those $650k that year.

Well, mainly because I had no idea about the actual costs. I kinda spoke too soon.

I just thought that moving that much data would cost some serious money. Apparently that's not really moving "that much data".

Wrong assumptions on my part :/

The engineer time to reimplement the other AWS services you're using may be substantially more than the $54k difference in bandwidth costs.

Depends on what they're using AWS for. OP seems to be running a simple and straightforward setup that just happens to use a lot of bandwidth. It doesn't take five full-time engineers to maintain a handful of LEMP servers.

Nothing prevents you from mixing and matching there are actually AWS services you can't find cheaper equivalents to elsewhere. My experience is that those of my consulting clients that want to migrate off AWS rarely have any problems replacing it. The cost savings usually pay back any development costs and the overall migration effort in 2-3 months at most.

If there will be 2 such companies, for that 108k I can wrote services backend that will be comptabile with AWS, so after a year you can transparently switch to that system on your bare metal and sell it to have your services for free.

I still didn't make my own "clone", because I can't afford machines to start selling it.

Hmm very unlikely. Thats 5 full time people.

More like 2 or 3 if you include overheads. Depends on location, of course.

It's where they make their money. Like when a restaurant pushes the desserts on you - the desserts have the highest markup by far on the menu.

AWS has a lot of 'free' services, which still have to be paid for. Some of those free services are things that benefit both the client and AWS, but would be avoided by many if folks had to pay for them (like IAM credentialling)

1TB/mo is roughly a constant 3mbit/s. So an estimated 2.1gbit/s. I recently had a 1gbit line from he.net quoted at $500 in Seattle.