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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

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
  Thanks. The prices are even more surprising if that quote by morphle is true and he can offer a TB for $0.25. From that perspective, even B2 is expensive.
chrismorgan 6y ago
At the level of colocation and the likes, I believe it’s standard to just pay for the pipe and you can use it as heavily as you like. Some hosting providers extend that to their users, as well. But there are practicality concerns to this for the specific domain of video distribution; suppose you’re a solo video producer: most of the time there’s a certain background level of watching, but when you release a new video there’s a massive spike of watchers. So in this case, having an enormously fat pipe and charging by data transferred is probably better for you than having a thin pipe that you can use as heavily as you like. If you have a 1Gbps link, for example, and 5Mbps video, you can never have even 200 people watching at any given time. But if you have a 40Gbps link and are charged by data transferred, you’ll be able to cope with a surge of closer to 8,000 viewers at once. (I bet that in practice it’d be struggling before even half that, but the point stands.) I know some hosting colocation deals are done as a certain baseline with burst capacity, e.g. 1Gbps with 10Gbps burst capacity, which would mean something like “you can use up to 10Gbps, so long as 99% of the time you stay below 1Gbps”. But all of these sorts of considerations are mostly important only when you’re a big shot, not when you’re just starting out or if you’re just doing it solo. For myself, though, I’m more likely to accept B2’s ~1.5¢ per watch-hour rates, using it to host the actual video files (you can configure PeerTube thus), because they’ll have gigantic pipes. Then if I magically reach the point where that’s costing large sums of money, then I can optimise it.

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
Thanks. The prices are even more surprising if that quote by morphle is true and he can offer a TB for $0.25. From that perspective, even B2 is expensive.

chrismorgan 6y ago

At the level of colocation and the likes, I believe it’s standard to just pay for the pipe and you can use it as heavily as you like. Some hosting providers extend that to their users, as well. But there are practicality concerns to this for the specific domain of video distribution; suppose you’re a solo video producer: most of the time there’s a certain background level of watching, but when you release a new video there’s a massive spike of watchers. So in this case, having an enormously fat pipe and charging by data transferred is probably better for you than having a thin pipe that you can use as heavily as you like. If you have a 1Gbps link, for example, and 5Mbps video, you can never have even 200 people watching at any given time. But if you have a 40Gbps link and are charged by data transferred, you’ll be able to cope with a surge of closer to 8,000 viewers at once. (I bet that in practice it’d be struggling before even half that, but the point stands.) I know some hosting colocation deals are done as a certain baseline with burst capacity, e.g. 1Gbps with 10Gbps burst capacity, which would mean something like “you can use up to 10Gbps, so long as 99% of the time you stay below 1Gbps”. But all of these sorts of considerations are mostly important only when you’re a big shot, not when you’re just starting out or if you’re just doing it solo. For myself, though, I’m more likely to accept B2’s ~1.5¢ per watch-hour rates, using it to host the actual video files (you can configure PeerTube thus), because they’ll have gigantic pipes. Then if I magically reach the point where that’s costing large sums of money, then I can optimise it.