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Self-host at places like OVH or Hetzner that bill by pipe bandwidth rather than gigabytes transferred. Your site may get slow if it gets a hug of death but you

by api 5y ago

Self-host at places like OVH or Hetzner that bill by pipe bandwidth rather than gigabytes transferred. Your site may get slow if it gets a hug of death but you won't get a stupid high bill. You can also get 2-4X the compute and RAM for pennies (comparatively). If you are using AWS, Google, Oracle, or Azure and are just using VMs, you are getting horribly ripped off. There is absolutely zero advantage to using these for just compute. None. They only make sense in a business setting if you are leveraging their managed services to save on labor costs, or if you need to elastically scale to really enormous sizes and have confidence that you won't run out of resources. VPS providers like Digital Ocean, Vultr, or Linode charge for bandwidth overages but their costs are generally at least an order of magnitude less than the big cloud vendors.

ghaff 5y ago
S3 can make sense for lightweight hosting of media files. I pay less than I would for a VPS. That said, if I were starting from scratch, I'd probably use Backblaze B2 because I believe they let you set hard quotas. But, yes, in general for an individual hobby site, I'd choose an option that resulted in a hug of death rather than a big bill.
- api 5y ago
  I think you can set quotas on S3 somehow too.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    You can set alerts but not hard quotas. This is a perpetual topic of debate around pretty much all the big cloud providers. They're really set up for companies that presumably don't want to "burn everything down" if they get a usage spike or screw something up. But it makes them at least something of a risk for an individual who absolutely doesn't want to wake up to a $3K bill under any circumstances.
eropple 5y ago
> Self-host at places like OVH that bill by pipe bandwidth rather than gigabytes transferred. Your site may get slow if it gets a hug of death but you won't get a stupid high bill. If your primary concern is cost consciousness, and when your failure case is "get slow and fall over" and you're OK with that, this makes sense. For the OP, who doesn't seem to have a profit motive, I think this is good advice. The caveat I would add is that a lot of folks try to extrapolate from personal stuff into the small-business (opposing "startup" -- that is, not swimming in VC money) realm, and it's easy to staple your hand to your face when looking at video in that way. Balancing cost controls against quality of service is kinda pretty hard for video because engagement is tied in pretty tightly to time-to-first-frame and to consistency of the video stream coming down, and even a well-provisioned set of boxes in an OVH datacenter somewhere are going to have more trouble with latency as well as bandwidth to geographically distributed clients. Yeah, you can fix this...by building your own CDN out of multiple points of presence at multiple data centers, but there are economies of scale to just paying your local friendly CDN overlords to ship your stuff from their POPs. Not all video usage is directly tied to revenue, though, which is why I characterize it as risk: the particulars of your venture may be such that the risk of higher costs due to sudden popularity is worth the quality of service during the 99.9% period for your users who aren't local to your point of presence. But there are no hard-and-fast rules here.

by api 5y ago

ghaff 5y ago

S3 can make sense for lightweight hosting of media files. I pay less than I would for a VPS. That said, if I were starting from scratch, I'd probably use Backblaze B2 because I believe they let you set hard quotas. But, yes, in general for an individual hobby site, I'd choose an option that resulted in a hug of death rather than a big bill.

api 5y ago
I think you can set quotas on S3 somehow too.
- ghaff 5y ago
  You can set alerts but not hard quotas. This is a perpetual topic of debate around pretty much all the big cloud providers. They're really set up for companies that presumably don't want to "burn everything down" if they get a usage spike or screw something up. But it makes them at least something of a risk for an individual who absolutely doesn't want to wake up to a $3K bill under any circumstances.

eropple 5y ago

> Self-host at places like OVH that bill by pipe bandwidth rather than gigabytes transferred. Your site may get slow if it gets a hug of death but you won't get a stupid high bill. If your primary concern is cost consciousness, and when your failure case is "get slow and fall over" and you're OK with that, this makes sense. For the OP, who doesn't seem to have a profit motive, I think this is good advice. The caveat I would add is that a lot of folks try to extrapolate from personal stuff into the small-business (opposing "startup" -- that is, not swimming in VC money) realm, and it's easy to staple your hand to your face when looking at video in that way. Balancing cost controls against quality of service is kinda pretty hard for video because engagement is tied in pretty tightly to time-to-first-frame and to consistency of the video stream coming down, and even a well-provisioned set of boxes in an OVH datacenter somewhere are going to have more trouble with latency as well as bandwidth to geographically distributed clients. Yeah, you can fix this...by building your own CDN out of multiple points of presence at multiple data centers, but there are economies of scale to just paying your local friendly CDN overlords to ship your stuff from their POPs. Not all video usage is directly tied to revenue, though, which is why I characterize it as risk: the particulars of your venture may be such that the risk of higher costs due to sudden popularity is worth the quality of service during the 99.9% period for your users who aren't local to your point of presence. But there are no hard-and-fast rules here.