Just have to say. I've been writing and publishing on the web for more than 20 years now. I've had a couple of high-traffic posts, been slashdotted (once), and was once featured in a blog post on The Atlantic. I had a podcast for four years with a moderate number of subscribers. All of this was self-hosted. I have NEVER had to worry about bandwidth costs. The bandwidth included with the hosting/VPS plans I've used over the years has always been more than sufficient.

This makes me think that bandwidth 'insurance' plans should be a thing. Pay a nominal cost each month to ensure that if something on your site becomes a massive viral hit you get a few weeks of bandwidth cost defrayment to weather the storm and allow you to find a longer term solution if needed.

Bandwidth is SO cheap though. Even bulk "overage" usually runs about $1/100GB. That's nothing.

When servers got slashdotted it was almost, even way back then, running out of CPU/Database connections, not bandwidth.

It's cheap unless:

a) you're a hobbyist/minor (effective budget of $0)

b) you're on cloud hosting and go over without a budget set

Seriously, bandwidth just is SUPER cheap period. The fact that some people theoretically might not even have $4.99 to kick towards their "hobby" does not negate that fact.

Like I said above, I did all the stuff I did with nothing more than $5/$10 month cloud hosting plans. Almost no one is going to hit any kind of bandwidth limits these days unless they are trying to run SaaS or just pirating full BluRays in the dumbest ways possible. But we're not talking about those people, we're talking about hobbyist content creators.

i'm a hobbyist, I've been slashdotted, front page of hn multiple times, and on other high profile sites that sent _lots_ of traffic. bandwidth cost is simply not an issue unless you're self hosting video files or some other obscenely large files, and there's no reason to be self hosting things like that. It would only be a concern if a botnet started hitting me with requests. I'm not on any fancy server plan.

That being said, I do pay for a monthly plan, because relying on free handouts for anything that matters is never a reasonable approach.

Simply being sensible about what kind of files you're asking people to download solves 99.9% of this problem and makes your site more enjoyable (faster) for users (especially mobile ones).

Define A.

A $5/mo digital ocean instance comes with 1TB of transfer. That's a lot unless you're doing something like self-hosting video.

Heroku free tier includes up to 2TB/month.

Even the free tier of AWS comes with 15GB/month.

I guess I'm more familiar with AWS but I thought the free tier was only for the first 12 months.

Really? It makes me think the opposite. Supposing I had ever bought such a policy, 100% of its cost would have been a complete waste, despite having some extremely high-traffic hits.

But all that aside, this product exists already, it's called a CDN.

Not a bad business idea.

Not a bad idea in general, but very risky as an independent business because web hosts can just offer it as a freebie or add-on the moment it starts catching steam with customers. They often already do, although they don't say so or commit to it.

Yes, it would only be viable for local businesses that can compete because they use budget peering or bandwidth.

Not very “next YouTube” in nature.

Isn't that Cloudflare?

> I have NEVER had to worry about bandwidth costs.

Well obviously you aren't using the right JS framework then. Modern technology will fix this problem for you. Especially if your pages are loading too fast.

AFAIK ActivityPub uses a fan-out to other servers using the sharedInbox of the receivers [1], this makes the cost of distribution to be diluted by all instances of the fedverse that follow that account.

And what are you missing on the current aggregator features? do you have in mind anything more then the normal action of following other users?

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#shared-inbox-delivery