I'll let you in on a little secret: paying for bandwidth per usage is for suckers. People think this is the only way to pay for bandwidth, but it's really only

I'll let you in on a little secret: paying for bandwidth per usage is for suckers. People think this is the only way to pay for bandwidth, but it's really only cloud providers who charge like that (and make a fortune off the racket). If you buy bandwidth from upstream IP transit providers, or rent a server in almost any non-cloud datacenter, you pay for capacity (e.g. $0.50 / Mbps), not usage. That is, you pay for the size of the pipe, not the amount of data going through it. Once you factor in optimizations like peering with ISPs and cross connect caching, bandwidth costs go way down. Also, in Netflix's case, they have a box containing terabytes of their most popular content sitting in almost every datacenter and peering with all major ISPs and backbone providers sharing the cross connect: https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/