3 ms·

As a rough estimate: 1 TB cost about $1.20 HD is 5MB per second, UHD is 25MB per second. [1] If you stream a 3min video in HD, that's about 200seconds which

As a rough estimate: 1 TB cost about $1.20 HD is 5MB per second, UHD is 25MB per second. [1] If you stream a 3min video in HD, that's about 200seconds which lead to 1GB traffic. So you can stream 1000 videos for $1.20, or one video for 0.12 cents. [1]https://www.epiphan.com/blog/bandwidth-for-streaming/ https://www.epiphan.com/blog/bandwidth-for-streaming/

chrismorgan 6y ago
That’s megabits per second, not megabytes, so your numbers are off by a factor of 8. Where has that $1.20 per terabyte figure come from? It doesn’t match the sorts of rates that I’ve seen talked about. As an example of commercial retail (not wholesale) rates: Backblaze B2 cloud storage is one of the better options available, at $5/TB/month for storage and $10/TB for bandwidth per https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html. (AWS, Azure and Google Cloud are all at least five times the cost for traffic. Seriously.) Meanwhile, your standard $5/month VPS (Digital Ocean, Vultr, &c.) tends to include 1TB of traffic per month (and scale up at that rate for a bit, though not far), but charge overages at $10/TB. I have no idea what’s going on with that lot, because Digital Ocean does bandwidth pooling across all your droplets, so it’ll be cheaper to add a new e.g. $20/month droplet and get 4TB of bandwidth, rather than paying $40 for that 4TB of bandwidth. But remember with PeerTube that the idea is that some of your bandwidth is covered by peering. I have no idea at all what the expected fractions are, but it’s going to depend heavily on your workload: videos just released that everyone’s watching right now will get better peering than videos from some time ago with scattered viewing (where I would expect you would get just minimal peering effects, but my opinion is hunch only and lacks any actual knowledge). 5Mbps is on the high side for HD (1920×1080 @ 30fps) video streaming. I’d think 3.5Mbps was a more typical figure that people would speak of, and for many sorts of content even 2.5Mbps can be more than you need. 3.5Mbps for three minutes is less than 80MB, rather than your 5MBps’s 1GB. At B2 rates (which are drastically higher than what you quoted), each of your three minute videos costs 0.08 cents to view, and each hour of video costs about one and a half of your pennies of the United States of America.
- toohotatopic 6y ago
  We come to different results because all my Bs were indeed bits, not bytes. I would love to be confirmed that B2 calculates download costs in bytes and not bits, but I assume that the reference dimension is bits since that would match the AWS numbers. So that $10/TB could actually be $80/TByte. Some time ago I asked about cheapest rates: [1] >I'm starting an ISP again, we will charge around $0,25 per TB The cheapest regularly available rate of which I am aware is hetzner.de at $1.20 (or rather euro) [4]. Amazon is at $0.09 per GB ($0.05 after 150TB). That's $90 per TB [2],[3]. You have to use Cloudfront to further reduce that cost, much like with Backblaze. But Cloudfront doesn't allow you to stream videos or serve pictures. In both cases I assume that it is TBit since it is network traffic. I haven't found any further clarification so I assume that they quote the more expensive option. That 80MByte video would be 640MBit. That's not too far off the 1GBit. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22760447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22760447 [2] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/ [3] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ [4] Some providers offer a rate-limited interface, e.g. 100Mbit, with unlimited traffic. This could lead to 32TByte per month for something like $10. However, like Cloudfront, I assume that the provider has the option to end the contract, otherwise there would be plenty of cheap image hosters.
  - OJFord 6y ago
    > We come to different results because all my Bs were bits, not bytes. Such Bs are usually bs, e.g. 'Mbps' vs. 'MB/s'.
    - toohotatopic 6y ago
      So the GB on the AWS sites are actually bytes?
  - chrismorgan 6y ago
    Excepting errors, capital B is always bytes, and lowercase b is always bits. Transfer rates are always done in bits (5Mbps and the likes), but amounts are always done in bytes (5MB and the likes). The B2 rates are $10/TB. Yes, ⅑–⅕ of the price of AWS, because AWS data transfer is outrageously expensive. (Refer to the B2 pricing page again, it shows this comparison.)
toohotatopic 6y ago
*edit: all numbers are indeed Bit, not Bytes. Aren't all network rates quoted in bits? In case those rates are in bytes: Streaming a 3min video at 2.5Mbitps leads to about 60Mbyte of traffic. At $1.20 per TByte, that's $0.000072 per view, or 0.0072 cents. Or the other way round: $1.20 allows you to serve 16,667 videos.

chrismorgan 6y ago

That’s megabits per second, not megabytes, so your numbers are off by a factor of 8. Where has that $1.20 per terabyte figure come from? It doesn’t match the sorts of rates that I’ve seen talked about. As an example of commercial retail (not wholesale) rates: Backblaze B2 cloud storage is one of the better options available, at $5/TB/month for storage and $10/TB for bandwidth per https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html. (AWS, Azure and Google Cloud are all at least five times the cost for traffic. Seriously.) Meanwhile, your standard $5/month VPS (Digital Ocean, Vultr, &c.) tends to include 1TB of traffic per month (and scale up at that rate for a bit, though not far), but charge overages at $10/TB. I have no idea what’s going on with that lot, because Digital Ocean does bandwidth pooling across all your droplets, so it’ll be cheaper to add a new e.g. $20/month droplet and get 4TB of bandwidth, rather than paying $40 for that 4TB of bandwidth. But remember with PeerTube that the idea is that some of your bandwidth is covered by peering. I have no idea at all what the expected fractions are, but it’s going to depend heavily on your workload: videos just released that everyone’s watching right now will get better peering than videos from some time ago with scattered viewing (where I would expect you would get just minimal peering effects, but my opinion is hunch only and lacks any actual knowledge). 5Mbps is on the high side for HD (1920×1080 @ 30fps) video streaming. I’d think 3.5Mbps was a more typical figure that people would speak of, and for many sorts of content even 2.5Mbps can be more than you need. 3.5Mbps for three minutes is less than 80MB, rather than your 5MBps’s 1GB. At B2 rates (which are drastically higher than what you quoted), each of your three minute videos costs 0.08 cents to view, and each hour of video costs about one and a half of your pennies of the United States of America.

toohotatopic 6y ago
We come to different results because all my Bs were indeed bits, not bytes. I would love to be confirmed that B2 calculates download costs in bytes and not bits, but I assume that the reference dimension is bits since that would match the AWS numbers. So that $10/TB could actually be $80/TByte. Some time ago I asked about cheapest rates: [1] >I'm starting an ISP again, we will charge around $0,25 per TB The cheapest regularly available rate of which I am aware is hetzner.de at $1.20 (or rather euro) [4]. Amazon is at $0.09 per GB ($0.05 after 150TB). That's $90 per TB [2],[3]. You have to use Cloudfront to further reduce that cost, much like with Backblaze. But Cloudfront doesn't allow you to stream videos or serve pictures. In both cases I assume that it is TBit since it is network traffic. I haven't found any further clarification so I assume that they quote the more expensive option. That 80MByte video would be 640MBit. That's not too far off the 1GBit. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22760447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22760447 [2] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/ [3] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ [4] Some providers offer a rate-limited interface, e.g. 100Mbit, with unlimited traffic. This could lead to 32TByte per month for something like $10. However, like Cloudfront, I assume that the provider has the option to end the contract, otherwise there would be plenty of cheap image hosters.
- OJFord 6y ago
  > We come to different results because all my Bs were bits, not bytes. Such Bs are usually bs, e.g. 'Mbps' vs. 'MB/s'.
  - toohotatopic 6y ago
    So the GB on the AWS sites are actually bytes?
- chrismorgan 6y ago
  Excepting errors, capital B is always bytes, and lowercase b is always bits. Transfer rates are always done in bits (5Mbps and the likes), but amounts are always done in bytes (5MB and the likes). The B2 rates are $10/TB. Yes, ⅑–⅕ of the price of AWS, because AWS data transfer is outrageously expensive. (Refer to the B2 pricing page again, it shows this comparison.)

toohotatopic 6y ago

*edit: all numbers are indeed Bit, not Bytes. Aren't all network rates quoted in bits? In case those rates are in bytes: Streaming a 3min video at 2.5Mbitps leads to about 60Mbyte of traffic. At $1.20 per TByte, that's $0.000072 per view, or 0.0072 cents. Or the other way round: $1.20 allows you to serve 16,667 videos.