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I run a small service, ifconfig.io, that is now getting 200 million hits a day from around the world. The response from it is about as small as you could make

I run a small service, ifconfig.io, that is now getting 200 million hits a day from around the world. The response from it is about as small as you could make it, however at that volume it is about 150gb a day. If I hosted this on AWS, the bandwidth alone without any compute would cost $900 a month. Prohibitively expensive for a service I just made for fun. The cost of just sending the HTTP response headers alone is the majority of that cost to. There is no way to shrink it. It is currently hosted on a single $40 linode instance and can easily keep up with the ~2400 sustained QPS. I think it can get up to about 50% more traffic before I have to scale it. And linode includes enough bandwidth with that compute to support the service without extra costs. I don't see how anyone pays the bandwidth ransom that GCP and AWS charge.

blantonl 7y ago
Well, to be fair, most of us who are paying the "bandwidth ransom" do have to scale, quite significantly I might add, and so the value is the platform as a whole. Furthermore, if you are doing something for fun like you are, the bandwidth ransom definitely comes into play for elastic cloud environments, but anyone doing anything significant on AWS/GCP has definitely already negotiated down their bandwidth spend with their AWS/GCP account management team.
- georgyo 7y ago
  At large scales, decisions need to get made. AWS and GCP will not negotiate with you unless you're big enough to make any if that worth their time. Netflix is a great example. They run most of their services on AWS. But they also run their own CDN with real hardware in data centers because serving it from Amazon would be a deal breaker. There are reasons to use AWS and GCP. But when I start a project, I don't start there. It's too expensive one way or another, and the "free" tier gets blown out extremely quickly. A smaller provider will provide what you need, normally be cheaper, and has no lock in. If you later decide that you really want autoscaling or managed databases then you can move easily. And if you do switch, you'll at least know what your product even wants to be, and it's projected growth.
jeremyjh 7y ago
For a lot of services, bandwidth is the smallest part of the hosting cost; often around 10%. It really depends on the kind of workloads and traffic you are getting. Of course, the low percentage is partially because their other services are also all very expensive relative to a VPS or dedicated host, but its not really a comparable service offering.

blantonl 7y ago

Well, to be fair, most of us who are paying the "bandwidth ransom" do have to scale, quite significantly I might add, and so the value is the platform as a whole. Furthermore, if you are doing something for fun like you are, the bandwidth ransom definitely comes into play for elastic cloud environments, but anyone doing anything significant on AWS/GCP has definitely already negotiated down their bandwidth spend with their AWS/GCP account management team.

georgyo 7y ago
At large scales, decisions need to get made. AWS and GCP will not negotiate with you unless you're big enough to make any if that worth their time. Netflix is a great example. They run most of their services on AWS. But they also run their own CDN with real hardware in data centers because serving it from Amazon would be a deal breaker. There are reasons to use AWS and GCP. But when I start a project, I don't start there. It's too expensive one way or another, and the "free" tier gets blown out extremely quickly. A smaller provider will provide what you need, normally be cheaper, and has no lock in. If you later decide that you really want autoscaling or managed databases then you can move easily. And if you do switch, you'll at least know what your product even wants to be, and it's projected growth.

jeremyjh 7y ago

For a lot of services, bandwidth is the smallest part of the hosting cost; often around 10%. It really depends on the kind of workloads and traffic you are getting. Of course, the low percentage is partially because their other services are also all very expensive relative to a VPS or dedicated host, but its not really a comparable service offering.