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It is annoying that the answer is basically "we paid someone [Cloudflare] to do it." In light of that I decided to run some of my own numbers and figure it out.
by mike_d 5y ago
It is annoying that the answer is basically "we paid someone [Cloudflare] to do it." In light of that I decided to run some of my own numbers and figure it out.
They are pushing about 245 Mbps out of Cloudflare (averaged over the month). Wholesale IP transit prices are anywhere from 10 cents to a dollar per Mbps depending on volume. Cloudflare dumps 40% of their traffic over peering, putting their price at $14.70/mo. Ignoring fixed capex of servers, Cloudflare is making about $25/mo on this customer.
Given the $11 Backblaze bill, I estimate about 2 TB of data.
A capable dedicated server with 2 TB of disk and 1 Gbps unlimited bandwidth will run about $30 in a major European metro, maybe double that for the US.
With a grand total of $370 vs. $60 worst case, they are spending 516% more to be "serverless."
Edit: Yes Cloudflare has more than one server. Double the price and put one in the US and you still come out ahead.
Edit 2: I'm not saying one way or the other is better. Just that the title is very clickbaity for a "put a credit card into a website" payoff.
- schleck8 5y agoThat would be a single node though, in contrast to cloudflare's edge, and would probably slow down download speeds for everyone outside europe
- walrus01 5y agoAn actually capable dedicated bare metal server with a good amount of RAM, CPU and disk, and 1Gbps will be more like $250-300/mo USD. This would be approximately equivalent in spec to what you could build for $2500 purchase cost if buying a 1U machine and colocating itself. For 30 bucks a month you'll get something very old and weak.
- mike_d 5y agoThe bulk of the traffic is serving static files. We figured out how to do this with "old and weak" hardware in the 90s. Here is a 3.3 GHz Xeon, 24 GB of RAM, with the required disk and bandwidth for $33: https://oneprovider.com/order/item/dediconf/59 https://oneprovider.com/order/item/dediconf/59
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago> The bulk of the traffic is serving static files. The bulk of the data transferring is static files because they're hosting large assets, but the rest of the article is about their API, database, etc. A single server in a single datacenter isn't comparable to a global CDN. They made it clear in the article that they value global latency, and they're willing to pay more for it. > Here is a 3.3 GHz Xeon, 24 GB of RAM, with the required disk and bandwidth for $33: https://oneprovider.com/order/item/dediconf/59 https://oneprovider.com/order/item/dediconf/59 That has mechanical spinning hard disks and a CPU that was released literally a decade ago. You're not going to replace Cloudflare, Firebase, their API server, and a global CDN with a single 10-year old machine serving files from a mechanical spinning hard disk, hosted by a company that almost nobody has heard of.
- mike_d 5y agoYahoo, Google, and eBay were built with gasp spinning hard disks. But fine, if you don't believe it I will happily extend an invitation to come see in person my racks of spinning rust and 10 year old servers in Los Angeles or Fremont that are running services that are used by millions of end users. My email is in my profile.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago> Yahoo, Google, and eBay were built with gasp spinning hard disks. Which they ditched as soon as physically possible. The internet has changed a lot since then. That much should be obvious. You can't reduce this article to "millions of end users" and then equate it with every other service. There's more to this article/service than you're suggesting, and there's more to a website than just users/month.
- sroussey 5y agoWhy not? We did that for years if not decades.
- herpderperator 5y agoWhat's wrong with a spinning hard disk? The files are super easy to read, we're talking milliseconds, and once done it stays in the page cache in RAM... that completely negates any SSD advantage. SSDs have little to no benefit in serving static files. If you're really strict on this it's trivial to preload these files in RAM after compiling your assets so you don't have to wait for a request.
- christophilus 5y agoThese are pretty capable in my experience: https://www.netcup.eu/vserver/ https://www.netcup.eu/vserver/ I’m a happy customer of theirs. The UI for managing things is a disaster, but once you get ssh access, it doesn’t really matter.
- jonathantf2 5y agoHow would you define actually capable? I can find servers with recent Xeon processors, good amounts of RAM and NVMe SSD with a gig uplink for around the 100 dollar mark.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago> A capable dedicated server with 2 TB of disk and 1 Gbps unlimited bandwidth will run about $30 in a major European metro, maybe double that for the US. Not even close to comparable. I think you're ignoring all of the functions they're paying for. They're not just hosting a few files. Also, your "worst case" is literally the most optimistic best case for a standalone single server, which completely disregards any redundancy and assumes that the $30/month server is truly unlimited/unmetered in every way. That's not a good assumption. Cloudflare is a global CDN that will be fast for everyone regardless of location and will soak up bursts of traffic with ease. It's also fast in a location-independent way, which won't be true for a single server in a single datacenter somewhere. Finally, the amount of effort it takes to do this with Cloudflare is trivial. The amount of effort it would take to maintain and optimize a standalone solution is not negligible. Cloudflare seems like a very good deal to me, unless you value your time at $0 and you have access to these truly unlimited, high-performance $30/month servers.
- metadat 5y agoBut they could deliver potentially ~300TB with a 1gbps unmetered link. Not that hard to come by, could even get to 3PB for $300/mo. Back in the day we used Texan Colo data centers with DrFTPD to do just this at massive scale. Bytes in, bytes out. Not a popular opinion here, but I firmly believe it's not necessary to play the CentralizedFlare game to get a winning outcome.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago> But they could deliver potentially ~300TB with a 1gbps unmetered link. Not that hard to come by, could even get to 3PB for $300/mo. Cloudflare Pro is $20/month per domain. Trying to run everything through a single server in a single datacenter just doesn't compare for globally-accessed websites like this, even with a 1Gbps unmetered link.
- metadat 5y agoI must be missing something, are you able to elaborate on how CentralizedPro Flare for $20 solves the OPs problems? I've accessed plenty of sites physically located in the USA from various EU countries, not to mention AUS and I didn't notice much difference as long as they had a good interconnect. Maybe not the best for YouTube, but there's only a few of those. Don't get me wrong, I see the appeal and fell for CF early on but not a fan anymore since they've grown into such a behemoth. Absolutely power corrupts absolutely.
- NorwegianDude 5y ago> Wholesale IP transit prices are anywhere from 10 cents to a dollar per Mbps depending on volume. 10 cents is far from the lower end for high quality IP transit. Cloudflare doesn't pay anywhere near $14.70/mo for 80 TB/mo. Even I spend much less than that on 80 TB in a month. On top of that, peering makes it even cheaper for Cloudflare, as you said. Cloudflare is very likely using peering for much more than 40 % of the traffic now, so it's even cheaper for them. The worst peering region for Cloudflare was North America in 2016 with 40 % peering according to Cloudflare blog posts.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- immibis 5y agoDo tell where you found your 1Gbps unlimited bandwidth for $30. Sure it wasn't $300?