> Source: Worked at one of the largest bandwidth consumers in the world.

Mindgeek? :-)

Just checked his LinkedIn and yes, literally lol

Just checked his LinkedIn and yes, literally lol

Oh wow, I didn’t even snoop, just a guess.

They're no longer Mindgeek - they go by Aylo now. I worked for the company that hosted PornHub.

My home connection uploads at 681mbit/s (just did the test over wifi) for 40 euros/months. At that price, I'd get 13tbit/s for 800k euros.

It's a bit surprising that you were not getting significantly better prices than individuals.

Price business pipes where they won’t cut you off for saturating that 24/7.

[edit] and that have good deliverability worldwide, no weird paths to other consumer IPs that intermittently fail to route or inexplicably have dial-up transfer speeds. And have anything like a real SLA.

I don't think they legally can in number of European jurisdictions. This isn't like Comcast overselling their copper cables - brand new fiber paid for by the EU comes with certain obligations.

Try uploading at that rate for a few months non-stop and see how long your residential ISP will continue doing business with you.

That can be taken out by a particularly unfortunate shovel or truck though, and isn’t sufficient to run a business on.

For 800k I would have 20000 different connections. This would allow me to survive many unfortunate shovels per month.

If bandwidth costs were very high a whole lot of the services we love would cost more or not exist.

I am so confused here. Either I’ve been doing high-bandwidth bit slinging extremely wrong for quite a while or a lot of HN has never done it at all and is opining on it anyway. It’s real money, IME.

Anyone who says "bandwidth costs are not really that bad" should spend 2 minutes playing with the AWS cost calculator.

You would think the VMs are the expensive part, but no, egress is easily multiple times the cost of the compute.

Cloud bandwidth pricing has nothing with do with costs and everything to do with lock in .

You can get 100x cheaper and unmetered at a low cost provider like OVH or hetzner or similar bare metal data centers .

It doesn’t even need significant monthly commits to get that pricing if you are running video streaming at scale you are not running on AWS or even tier 2 like OVH for sure

Are they actually unmetered or are they unmetered*?

* up to 2TB per month

It's unmetered*

* if our upstream is saturated we're going to look at our biggest users and if the number is really big we'll send them a polite email to please reduce it or pay more.

There are reports of people getting emails from Hetzner after sending multiple Gbps continuously for several months. That's the level you have to reach before the * kicks in. Only 1Gbps servers are unmetered, so you'd have to have several.

If you want to know a better approximation of their true cost just look at their non-unlimited plans: 20TB/month included for free; 1€/TB (excl VAT) after that.

I have one more interesting data point to add: I was quoted 950€/month for a dedicated 10Gbps between Berlin and Amsterdam (about 600km) plus peering at AMS-IX, or 300€ for 1Gbps. (They're not secretive and you can just ask for a quote using their sales contact form). Extrapolating, it seems that 1€ is worth about 2.5 petabyte-kilometers, at least within the dense interconnections of continental Europe. About twice the price of shipping a petabyte of hard drives the same distance.

> If you want to know a better approximation of their true cost just look at their non-unlimited plans: 20TB/month included for free; 1€/TB (excl VAT) after that.

I will point out that this is still about 50x-80x cheaper than Amazon. Not far off the claim of 100x.

There are enterprise plans that offer significant savings if your scale is high enough.

Mhm. Save literally 98% of your egress bill by avoiding AWS, GCP and Azure.

AWS is particularly bad at this for S3.

Cloudflare and most other Object Storage Providers either fully free egress for all users or at-least for inter-cloud transit so you can then put a free/cheap CDN like Cloudflare in front and not pay all that much for b/w.

AWS refuses to participate. Costs of retrieval of all data plus associated bandwidth is a so high for many people that they stick to S3 including me.

Yes, it’s unmetered. Just colocation. You pay for the maximum rate basically not the amount sent, if that.

The cloud bandwidth you get on your VPS has nothing to do with costs at the scale where you’ve racks in data centers.

But anyone doing things at great scale, isn’t going with OVH. You could use it as an origin I goes but you’d still need CDN for decent content delivery.

Anyone doing things at great scale is buying many-gigabit connections directly. Which is also 100x cheaper than AWS.

The number above was a thousand dollars per month per 10gbps, and AWS would charge more than a hundred thousand dollars at the listed $0.05/GB price.

Note: that was for a dedicated 10-gigabit link from specific location A to specific location B, plus a peering at one large IX, without any access to the rest of the internet.

Nonetheless it does give a ballpark for the cost of bandwidth being a lot lower than people think. A 10G internet connection would be cheaper to provide in some parts of that equation and more expensive in others - should end up in the same ballpark.

By "above" I meant ckdarby's number.

And honestly 10 cents per Mbps sounds kind of high for raw transit, I interpreted it as a price for actual utilization.

It was more than 5 years ago and was not a direct commitment. Another company was being used for their data centers, and this was a lease/rental agreement of equipment; Think colocation model, but where you're like 50-80% of being the main client of the data centers.

Add 10-25% profit for that company to get closer to true "raw transit" pricing from the carriers directly.

Also, can you show me any public pricing that is 100x cheaper than AWS? With same QOS! Or are you just throwing numbers around?

What specifically is the QOS for AWS?

But sure, if you want citations for $0.10 per Mbps in bulk for transit, that's easy to find/beat.

https://he.net/ "Get BGP+IPv6+IPv4 for $0.06/Mbps!"

https://www.fdcservers.net/ip-transit Europe, North America: 10Gbps $499/month

And telegeography just sells information, but they had a blog post that's now three years out of date reporting that "In Q2 2021, the lowest 10 GigE prices on offer were at the brink of $0.09 per Mbps per month. The lowest for 100 GigE were $0.06 per Mbps per month."

You need to factor in that your utilization won't be 100%, but if you're comparing 6 cents for a Mbps and and 5 cents for a gigabyte, then the exact point where AWS is 100x more expensive is when your line is 36% utilized.

Yes, at certain scale you likely have deals with many CDNs.

At even higher scale (YouTube, Facebook or even Netflix ) you are going to be putting content caching servers at the local ISP PoPs : it is mutually beneficial to do so .

So you can piggy back on the CDNs that do the same until you can afford to do so, with the same performance. This isn’t a privilege only given to those cloud providers, anyone with a checkbook and a pulse can do it.

The key point is video streaming products are not impaired because of high cost of bandwidth, that only YouTube can only afford because Google subsidizes it from other revenue. YouTube is profitable by itself, the combination of premium and ads is more than enough to pay for it.

It is hard to directly compete on long-form video because of audience and content depth advantage Google has with YouTube.

There are successful niche players who are fairly large (like Vimeo or Twitch or even OnlyFans) who focus on specific markets that don't require social network advantage like corporate or smaller segments etc.

For general purpose media, creators are going to focus on the platform with most audience and vice-versa, very hard to break that.

Agreed, I guess my point in my original comment is; yes, bandwidth is cheap but you aren’t going to compete at any scale hosting at OVH as was proposed. And you’ll need a lot more than cheap VMs too.

It was not that OVH is competitive for streaming , it is that even likes of OVH is orders of magnitude cheaper than cloud, let alone actual setups for streaming companies whose cost data no one in this thread has access to.

To be fair, that is the penalty of being in a shared cloud. They are incetivized to keep their customers from using everything, everywhere, all at once.

Jump into a 'bare metal' datacenter and things can get much different.

Not even AWS. Any CDN. It won’t be AWS-bad (way, way, way under) but it ain’t good.

You’re getting scammed with the AWS cost calculator or anything more than $20/mbps

Assuming 10 Mbit/s per stream that would serve 1 million concurrent streams 24/7. If we assume people watch 2.4 hours per day on average, it could support 10 million active users. Or a cost to serve for bandwidth alone of 1 USD/user per year.

Yeah I'm coming to similar numbers. I guess this is why the Cloudflare CTO has said several times on hackernews that at scale bandwidth is free.

Pretty sure I didn't say that, but I know who did: Cloudflare's CEO (eastdakota). https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Could anyone help me understand what this means in practice, at scale? I keep doing the math and getting numbers either way to small or way too big. If each users streams 200MB over a 10 minute session, and they arrive on the site uniformly distributed over time (false premises, I know), how much would 1,000,000 sessions a month cost? I get confused by terabits and terabytes and how "per second" bandwidth metering actually works. I keep getting to the conclusion that for $1,000,000 you could handle 16,200,000,000 sessions per month, which is more traffic than phub gets and less money than I assume they spend.