How do you handle the bandwidth costs? These are probably a negligible proportion of the costs at the scale of an Instagram, but hosting providers still have a

How do you handle the bandwidth costs? These are probably a negligible proportion of the costs at the scale of an Instagram, but hosting providers still have a big profit cut at smaller scales. For example, I could host all my images directly on my Linode, but the cheapest Linode has only 1 TB of outbound transfer a month (for $5), and over quota you're actually charged more than that, $10 / TB. That comes with only 25 GB of storage. They'd also probably be pretty slow for most of my visitors, since they're hosted on a single server somewhere in California. If you want faster distribution around the country and globe, you might consider S3... that same 1 TB of data out is going to cost you $90 / month. Meanwhile, it's clear the REAL costs are not that high. Flickr Pro is a mere $5 a month, with the same high quality (uncompressed) photos, and a global CDN. You can store an unlimited number of pictures with Flickr Pro. This is already way cheaper and faster than anything I can set up on my own, as far as I know, and SmugMug is still making money off of this, presumably, enough to cover their free tier.