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Perhaps the most interesting point, which I hadn't considered in all of this, is the amount of advertising and discounts offered by VPN companies. Bandwidth is

by Shank 5y ago

Perhaps the most interesting point, which I hadn't considered in all of this, is the amount of advertising and discounts offered by VPN companies. Bandwidth is relatively expensive for a fixed price service. If a VPN is expecting you to slurp down gigabytes of data overseas each day, surely that transit has a cost, right? Why is it that some services offer astounding 93% off discounts [0]? Why is that they almost always have capital to sponsor seemingly all sorts of random assorted content? Tom Scott has a bit of a point: it's really odd that there are just so many of these companies, and they offer very suspiciously good prices. Is that the byproduct of everyone buying and not using VPNs? Or something else? [0]: hxxps://www [dot] bleepingcomputer [dot] /offer/deals/new-deal-93-percent-off-a-windscribe-vpn-pro-lifetime-subscription/

netr0ute 5y ago
The best way to manage this is to have a Tier 1 peering agreement, so you pay nada for bandwidth.
wmf 5y ago
The simplest explanation is that bandwidth is in fact not expensive and most people are light users.
pseudo0 5y ago
Commercial bandwidth is pretty cheap. You can get servers for a few hundred bucks a month that have one gbps unmetered bandwidth. Then just oversubscribe as much as possible, and the end result is a few bucks a month per user. The discounts are arguably a bit of deceptive marketing, as I've seen some of those services run the same 90% discount campaigns for years. At that point it's the base price, not a discount. The number of options is easily explained by the low barriers to entry, as virtually all of these services just stick a GUI on top of OpenVPN.
- franga2000 5y ago
  You have a point about oversubscribing, but you can't really run a VPN service on just any cheap server hosting you can find. That will basically ensure you're on every blocklist under the sun and that defeats the main use most people have for VPNs.
  - 411111111111111 5y ago
    Your can get bare metal servers with unmetered bandwidth from Hetzner for way less then $100 per month. These ips aren't in the ranges that are usually blocked by cloudflare etc.
    - SahAssar 5y ago
      Those get you two countries, finland and germany. Most VPN countries advertise dozens or up to a hundred countries. Add in OVH who also have unmetered and you also get canada, france, UK and poland. A good start, but I don't think that is what these VPN providers are doing. Those ranges are also often blocked by sites like netflix, which wouldn't play well with the VPN customers.
resfirestar 5y ago
The offers for ridiculously long term (2+ years or lifetime) discounted service seem like bets that most users are not going to be long term VPN users. If the objective is to make a user pay $60 for a product they’ll use for a week or two and forget about, just extend the term out as far as you want to make it seem like a better deal.

by Shank 5y ago

netr0ute 5y ago

The best way to manage this is to have a Tier 1 peering agreement, so you pay nada for bandwidth.

wmf 5y ago

The simplest explanation is that bandwidth is in fact not expensive and most people are light users.

pseudo0 5y ago

Commercial bandwidth is pretty cheap. You can get servers for a few hundred bucks a month that have one gbps unmetered bandwidth. Then just oversubscribe as much as possible, and the end result is a few bucks a month per user. The discounts are arguably a bit of deceptive marketing, as I've seen some of those services run the same 90% discount campaigns for years. At that point it's the base price, not a discount. The number of options is easily explained by the low barriers to entry, as virtually all of these services just stick a GUI on top of OpenVPN.

franga2000 5y ago
You have a point about oversubscribing, but you can't really run a VPN service on just any cheap server hosting you can find. That will basically ensure you're on every blocklist under the sun and that defeats the main use most people have for VPNs.
- 411111111111111 5y ago
  Your can get bare metal servers with unmetered bandwidth from Hetzner for way less then $100 per month. These ips aren't in the ranges that are usually blocked by cloudflare etc.
  - SahAssar 5y ago
    Those get you two countries, finland and germany. Most VPN countries advertise dozens or up to a hundred countries. Add in OVH who also have unmetered and you also get canada, france, UK and poland. A good start, but I don't think that is what these VPN providers are doing. Those ranges are also often blocked by sites like netflix, which wouldn't play well with the VPN customers.

resfirestar 5y ago

The offers for ridiculously long term (2+ years or lifetime) discounted service seem like bets that most users are not going to be long term VPN users. If the objective is to make a user pay $60 for a product they’ll use for a week or two and forget about, just extend the term out as far as you want to make it seem like a better deal.