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> Their sponsorship of icanhazip.com has saved me tens of thousands of dollars per month. Can someone please explain how does returning a few hundred bytes of

• karamanolev 3y ago
  > In 2021, the traffic I once received in a month started arriving in 24 hours. The site went from a billion requests per day to 30-35 billion requests per day over a weekend. 30 billion times 350 bytes (size of my response) is equal to 10.5 terabytes (base-10) a day. 84 terabits per day, 84000/3600/24 ~= 1 gigabit if my math is right. A fully saturated 1 gigabit pipe of worldwide internet costs a lot. So, there.
  • akho 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • deadbunny 3y ago
      Go read TFA?
  • alpb 3y ago
    Really interesting. I never heard of this website and was surprised to hear this volume of traffic it's getting. (I always used curlmyip.org or whatsmyip.net|.com). I wonder what is the rationale for providing a non-rate limited service that can be easily abused like this. The volume almost suggests some stuff like IoT devices or other software use this to test internet connectivity. Or botnets?
    • thefifthsetpin 3y ago
      I believe that creating a traffic rate-limiting system, which is more cost-effective than simply echoing back the requestor's IP address, is likely to be a complex task. However, I haven't personally performed the calculations to confirm this.
    • vlan0 3y ago
      >Seeing that over 90% of my traffic load was malicious and abusive was frustrating. Dealing with the abuse emails and complaints was worse. My take. I suspect Cloudflare benefited allowing that traffic. It's another data point/tool in their toolbox against the baddies.
      • mhayden 3y ago
        That was something I discussed with them and I certainly hope they're doing it now. ;)
  • Zetice 3y ago
    At $0.085 per GB (some us-east-1 exfil cost Google gave me), 10TB is... ~$1k/day? Yeah sorry, I would not pay $30k/mo so y'all could track your external IP addresses...
    • TechBro8615 3y ago
      OP said a fully saturated gigabit link, which generally means you pay for transit ("size of the pipe") rather than "stuff pushed through it." I haven't been in the market for a long time, but 5-10 years ago the price was on the order of $0.50 per mbps, so $500 for a 1000 gbps ("gigabit") link. Usually you buy this with a dedicated server or colocation. You wouldn't want to host this in the cloud because they price gouge you on bandwidth by charging for stuff through the pipe. And that's if you truly expect to saturate it. If you just want to take the risk and go for oversold fiber, you can pay some nominal price for "unmetered bandwidth" (with the caveat that if you're saturating the pipe, your host will probably make you pay for it eventually).
    • Fornax96 3y ago
      That's ridiculous bandwidth pricing. you can get unmetered gigabit at Hetzner for €20 per month. Need 2 Gb? Order a second server.
      • Zetice 3y ago
        Do you think this is an important point?
      • lkbm 3y ago
        He was using Hetzner and says it was costing him $200/month. He then had to spin up a second server, presumably increasing the cost, and it was still struggling. From there traffic doubled, and he moved to Cloudflare Workers. And then traffic 30xed. I suspect it's more about request count (>300k per second) than raw number of bits.
• bunga-bunga 3y ago
  It mentions 2 petabytes of data per month, plus compute for a trillion requests per month. It sounds like all kinds of optimizations were made so probably it can’t be much cheaper. My guess is that the “tens of thousands” is calculated on CF Workers prices though.
• veave 3y ago
  >Also why could it not work fine behind a Cloudflare free tier? Eh, how would that even work? You have to serve the requests anyway.