4 ms·

Why is this downvoted? Nitpicking of the phrase "niche library" aside, I'm having trouble understanding this without more context as well. The post starts: >

by buu700 10y ago

Why is this downvoted? Nitpicking of the phrase "niche library" aside, I'm having trouble understanding this without more context as well. The post starts: > Our CDN has been an important part of MathJax’s history. When MathJax made its first public release in 2010, hosting a library like MathJax was a complex challenge. The CDN launched a year later and helped resolve this difficulty What is "like MathJax" alluding to? Standing up a web host to serve a single JS file sounds like the opposite of a "complex challenge", so there must be something else going on here. After reading further down, I see that the post does mention that "A common concern with local installations is the size of a complete copy of MathJax, in particular the ~29,000 PNGs", so I guess that's what they're talking about? If so, the comments at the top make more sense and their having had their own CDN at all is more understandable in that light, but it seems needlessly confusing not to lead with that explanation.

joshmn 10y ago
Your guess is as good as mine. I edited my original post to reflect my subjectiveness of niche. I guess my point was that... Okay, so they took advantage of CloudFlare. Great, plenty of people do that, but not on the scale of 10s of TBs. What plan were they on with CF? The $20/month one? If I was a provider, I wouldn't want someone moving that volume of data through my pipes for $20/month (but as a developer, I'd love it) They mentioned how Google provided free storage. Storage is so cheap! Providers make their money on bandwidth. Having said, I can't imagine what kind of price they paid for bandwidth. Like I alluded to in my (now edited) original post: Guys, it never hurts to do your research in the hosting space and learn that there is more to hosting than just AWS/Google/Azure/Heroku/OVH/DigitalOcean/Vultr. Go to webhostingtalk.com, learn a bit, browse the offers forums, write some emails, compare providers, ask questions. Hosting isn't complicated, especially compared to some of the problems you're/we're solving.
- lrem 10y ago
  Let's say you don't care about DDOS protection and can live with 0.1x the number of PoPs. How much does it cost these days to host these terabytes/month from ≥10 well spread locations?
  - joshmn 10y ago
    FDC comes out to ~$350/month. They always have promos going on, wouldn't be surprised to that number get halved without much effort.
  - zzzcpan 10y ago
    If you care about cost you can get away with only a couple of locations, totaling maybe slightly over $100 monthly.
    - tyingq 10y ago
      I don't see 70TB of outbound bandwidth fitting into $100/month. Even with unmetered bandwidth servers, you would need quite a few of them. 100Mbps, full throttle, for a month, is less than half their 70TB/month requirement. And that's if the bandwidth needs were even across the whole day, without spikes. Even a bare bones budget setup is going to be $300-$400/month, and that's cutting it very close and providing crap service with some users downloading from across the globe.
      - zzzcpan 10y ago
        OVH or Online.net alone can get you that much bandwidth with a dedicated server and for less money. Use one to serve US users and the other one to serve EU users. CDNs are not a zero-sum game, you will always have users downloading "from across the globe" or over slow connections.
        tyingq 10y ago
        I'm assuming a budget provider like OVH or online.net to get to the $300-$400 a month already. I suppose, yes, you could instruct users to pick from a North American or EU set of urls.
        zzzcpan 10y ago
        "I suppose, yes, you could instruct users to pick from a North American or EU set of urls." No, you instruct your DNS to point to one location for EU users and another location for US users, urls don't change.
philh 10y ago
I don't think it's a single JS file. The query string seems to be significant. I currently request MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML. (I set it up years ago, so I have no particular recollection of choosing that query string, but I'm confident it was significant.)

by buu700 10y ago

joshmn 10y ago

Your guess is as good as mine. I edited my original post to reflect my subjectiveness of niche. I guess my point was that... Okay, so they took advantage of CloudFlare. Great, plenty of people do that, but not on the scale of 10s of TBs. What plan were they on with CF? The $20/month one? If I was a provider, I wouldn't want someone moving that volume of data through my pipes for $20/month (but as a developer, I'd love it) They mentioned how Google provided free storage. Storage is so cheap! Providers make their money on bandwidth. Having said, I can't imagine what kind of price they paid for bandwidth. Like I alluded to in my (now edited) original post: Guys, it never hurts to do your research in the hosting space and learn that there is more to hosting than just AWS/Google/Azure/Heroku/OVH/DigitalOcean/Vultr. Go to webhostingtalk.com, learn a bit, browse the offers forums, write some emails, compare providers, ask questions. Hosting isn't complicated, especially compared to some of the problems you're/we're solving.

lrem 10y ago
Let's say you don't care about DDOS protection and can live with 0.1x the number of PoPs. How much does it cost these days to host these terabytes/month from ≥10 well spread locations?
- joshmn 10y ago
  FDC comes out to ~$350/month. They always have promos going on, wouldn't be surprised to that number get halved without much effort.
- zzzcpan 10y ago
  If you care about cost you can get away with only a couple of locations, totaling maybe slightly over $100 monthly.
  - tyingq 10y ago
    I don't see 70TB of outbound bandwidth fitting into $100/month. Even with unmetered bandwidth servers, you would need quite a few of them. 100Mbps, full throttle, for a month, is less than half their 70TB/month requirement. And that's if the bandwidth needs were even across the whole day, without spikes. Even a bare bones budget setup is going to be $300-$400/month, and that's cutting it very close and providing crap service with some users downloading from across the globe.
    - zzzcpan 10y ago
      OVH or Online.net alone can get you that much bandwidth with a dedicated server and for less money. Use one to serve US users and the other one to serve EU users. CDNs are not a zero-sum game, you will always have users downloading "from across the globe" or over slow connections.
      - tyingq 10y ago
        I'm assuming a budget provider like OVH or online.net to get to the $300-$400 a month already. I suppose, yes, you could instruct users to pick from a North American or EU set of urls.
        zzzcpan 10y ago
        "I suppose, yes, you could instruct users to pick from a North American or EU set of urls." No, you instruct your DNS to point to one location for EU users and another location for US users, urls don't change.

philh 10y ago

I don't think it's a single JS file. The query string seems to be significant. I currently request MathJax.js?config=TeX-AMS-MML_HTMLorMML. (I set it up years ago, so I have no particular recollection of choosing that query string, but I'm confident it was significant.)