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There are three ways to manage bandwidth prices: 1. Put servers where bandwidth is cheap (not Sydney, for example) 2. Constrain throughput per server 3. Buy
by mrkurt 4y ago
There are three ways to manage bandwidth prices:
1. Put servers where bandwidth is cheap (not Sydney, for example)
2. Constrain throughput per server
3. Buy from cheap transit providers like Cogent
Hetzner does all three. Bandwidth in the US/EU is very cheap. They meter total throughput on their services. And they use cheap providers. None of these are bad choices, just different than ours.
Our product has multiple layers, too. When you connect to a Fly app, you hit our edge, then traffic goes to a VM that's probably in another region. When you hit a hetzner server, there are no intermediate hops.
We usually pay that three times as data moves from customer VMs to our edges to end users (out from our edge to worker vm, out from worker vm to our edge, out from our edge to end user). Or 10x, in some cases, if data moves from Virginia to Chennai to an end user.
We pay $0.005/GB in the US and $0.9/GB in Chennai. You can see how this might add up. :)
- boundlessdreamz 4y agoThe chennai pricing in incredibly steep. It's weird that bandwidth prices for end-users in India is among the cheapest (if not the cheapest) in the world but enterprise customers are paying so much.
- donavanm 4y agoJio and friends are (were?) subsidizing connectivity and trying to drive growth to make it up later/elsewhere like payments and services. Service providers come to the opposite problem. Local infra sucks, the market is full of incumbents, and india is generally protective of those markets. Very similar dynamics with china as well.
- mrkurt 4y ago$0.9 is a typo, I meant $0.09/GB in Chennai. We're not taking that much of a haircut.
- snark42 4y agoYou forgot play the peering game which can lead to substantially cheaper bandwidth when you connect to enough Tier1/2 ISPs. I think Hetzner does this some as well.