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Equivalent pricing: Amazon Cloudfront: $59770 per month Google Cloud CDN: $50000 per month Fastly: $144200 per month etc etc. If they can't get together $12

by mark242 10y ago

Equivalent pricing: Amazon Cloudfront: $59770 per month Google Cloud CDN: $50000 per month Fastly: $144200 per month etc etc. If they can't get together $12000 per month for Cloudflare, they sure as hell don't have a viable business model.

spiderfarmer 10y ago
I can't believe they never researched CDN prices beforehand.
- mkroman 10y ago
  It probably started as a hobby project to fill a need and grew way more than they expected it to.
  - idp 10y ago
    The project is now certainly larger than it was expected to become, although this doesn't absolve the team of not taking preemptive action sooner. Disclaimer: I'm with the team.
sheraz 10y ago
Yeah I priced Azure as well, and it clocked in at just over $60k USD
zzzcpan 10y ago
Or like $1000-$1500 per month for a dedicated server with 10G unlimited bandwidth. This is as low as it gets.
- Artemis2 10y ago
  Would one server be enough for their load though?
- mark242 10y ago
  Could you run the service off a few OVH dedicated boxes with 3Gbps? Sure, you could, but it's going to be painful, and at that point imgur is the better choice anyways.
  - zzzcpan 10y ago
    No, it's not painful at all. I think multiple boxes on different ISPs is the way they should go, but it's going to be more expensive, than a single cheapest 10G box.
- idp 10y ago
  One server would not be nearly enough. PI is running on 14 dedicated machines, and even this is not enough to handle the load without a caching CDN. Source: I'm with the team.
  - matheweis 10y ago
    If you have the engineering capacity, and your business model can at least sustain some amount of overhead, you can build your own CDN. Look into PhoenixNAP and other similar providers that are located at non-profit peering sites and have reduced bandwidth costs. PhoenixNAP (as the example) will lease you a mid range bare metal server with 16GB/RAM and 100TB of data/mo in the $150.00/mo - $300.00/mo range (depending on your processor needs; well optimized nginx doing just proxying should scream). You can't exceed some unwritten bandwidth cap because you're explicitly paying extra for the 100TB of BW. For 20 caching servers firing 2PB/mo you're looking at around $3000 - $6000/mo... Seems like you could optimize this down with fewer high powered caching servers and paying for the extra bandwidth... is the engineering time and $2500/mo really out of reach? Best of luck.
idp 10y ago
Sure as hell we don't. Setting up AdSense and content recommendations widgets did the trick for a long time and allowed the project to grow; the team has not been active enough in exploring better monetization channels. Also, before PostImage came to use CF, it used a number of cool tricks to conserve bandwidth that had since then been cut out as they were incompatible with CDN caching. Source: I'm with the team.

by mark242 10y ago

spiderfarmer 10y ago

I can't believe they never researched CDN prices beforehand.

mkroman 10y ago
It probably started as a hobby project to fill a need and grew way more than they expected it to.
- idp 10y ago
  The project is now certainly larger than it was expected to become, although this doesn't absolve the team of not taking preemptive action sooner. Disclaimer: I'm with the team.

sheraz 10y ago

Yeah I priced Azure as well, and it clocked in at just over $60k USD

zzzcpan 10y ago

Or like $1000-$1500 per month for a dedicated server with 10G unlimited bandwidth. This is as low as it gets.

Artemis2 10y ago
Would one server be enough for their load though?
mark242 10y ago
Could you run the service off a few OVH dedicated boxes with 3Gbps? Sure, you could, but it's going to be painful, and at that point imgur is the better choice anyways.
- zzzcpan 10y ago
  No, it's not painful at all. I think multiple boxes on different ISPs is the way they should go, but it's going to be more expensive, than a single cheapest 10G box.
idp 10y ago
One server would not be nearly enough. PI is running on 14 dedicated machines, and even this is not enough to handle the load without a caching CDN. Source: I'm with the team.
- matheweis 10y ago
  If you have the engineering capacity, and your business model can at least sustain some amount of overhead, you can build your own CDN. Look into PhoenixNAP and other similar providers that are located at non-profit peering sites and have reduced bandwidth costs. PhoenixNAP (as the example) will lease you a mid range bare metal server with 16GB/RAM and 100TB of data/mo in the $150.00/mo - $300.00/mo range (depending on your processor needs; well optimized nginx doing just proxying should scream). You can't exceed some unwritten bandwidth cap because you're explicitly paying extra for the 100TB of BW. For 20 caching servers firing 2PB/mo you're looking at around $3000 - $6000/mo... Seems like you could optimize this down with fewer high powered caching servers and paying for the extra bandwidth... is the engineering time and $2500/mo really out of reach? Best of luck.

idp 10y ago

Sure as hell we don't. Setting up AdSense and content recommendations widgets did the trick for a long time and allowed the project to grow; the team has not been active enough in exploring better monetization channels. Also, before PostImage came to use CF, it used a number of cool tricks to conserve bandwidth that had since then been cut out as they were incompatible with CDN caching. Source: I'm with the team.