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Cloud bandwidth pricing has nothing with do with costs and everything to do with lock in . You can get 100x cheaper and unmetered at a low cost provider like O

Cloud bandwidth pricing has nothing with do with costs and everything to do with lock in . You can get 100x cheaper and unmetered at a low cost provider like OVH or hetzner or similar bare metal data centers . It doesn’t even need significant monthly commits to get that pricing if you are running video streaming at scale you are not running on AWS or even tier 2 like OVH for sure

Aerroon 2y ago
Are they actually unmetered or are they unmetered*? * up to 2TB per month
- immibis 2y ago
  It's unmetered* * if our upstream is saturated we're going to look at our biggest users and if the number is really big we'll send them a polite email to please reduce it or pay more. There are reports of people getting emails from Hetzner after sending multiple Gbps continuously for several months. That's the level you have to reach before the * kicks in. Only 1Gbps servers are unmetered, so you'd have to have several. If you want to know a better approximation of their true cost just look at their non-unlimited plans: 20TB/month included for free; 1€/TB (excl VAT) after that. I have one more interesting data point to add: I was quoted 950€/month for a dedicated 10Gbps between Berlin and Amsterdam (about 600km) plus peering at AMS-IX, or 300€ for 1Gbps. (They're not secretive and you can just ask for a quote using their sales contact form). Extrapolating, it seems that 1€ is worth about 2.5 petabyte-kilometers, at least within the dense interconnections of continental Europe. About twice the price of shipping a petabyte of hard drives the same distance.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    > If you want to know a better approximation of their true cost just look at their non-unlimited plans: 20TB/month included for free; 1€/TB (excl VAT) after that. I will point out that this is still about 50x-80x cheaper than Amazon. Not far off the claim of 100x.
    - immibis 2y ago
      Mhm. Save literally 98% of your egress bill by avoiding AWS, GCP and Azure.
      - manquer 2y ago
        AWS is particularly bad at this for S3. Cloudflare and most other Object Storage Providers either fully free egress for all users or at-least for inter-cloud transit so you can then put a free/cheap CDN like Cloudflare in front and not pay all that much for b/w. AWS refuses to participate. Costs of retrieval of all data plus associated bandwidth is a so high for many people that they stick to S3 including me.
    - ec109685 2y ago
      There are enterprise plans that offer significant savings if your scale is high enough.
- keepamovin 2y ago
  Yes, it’s unmetered. Just colocation. You pay for the maximum rate basically not the amount sent, if that. The cloud bandwidth you get on your VPS has nothing to do with costs at the scale where you’ve racks in data centers.
mtnGoat 2y ago
But anyone doing things at great scale, isn’t going with OVH. You could use it as an origin I goes but you’d still need CDN for decent content delivery.
- manquer 2y ago
  Yes, at certain scale you likely have deals with many CDNs. At even higher scale (YouTube, Facebook or even Netflix ) you are going to be putting content caching servers at the local ISP PoPs : it is mutually beneficial to do so .
  - mtnGoat 2y ago
    So you can piggy back on the CDNs that do the same until you can afford to do so, with the same performance. This isn’t a privilege only given to those cloud providers, anyone with a checkbook and a pulse can do it.
    - manquer 2y ago
      The key point is video streaming products are not impaired because of high cost of bandwidth, that only YouTube can only afford because Google subsidizes it from other revenue. YouTube is profitable by itself, the combination of premium and ads is more than enough to pay for it. It is hard to directly compete on long-form video because of audience and content depth advantage Google has with YouTube. There are successful niche players who are fairly large (like Vimeo or Twitch or even OnlyFans) who focus on specific markets that don't require social network advantage like corporate or smaller segments etc. For general purpose media, creators are going to focus on the platform with most audience and vice-versa, very hard to break that.
      - mtnGoat 2y ago
        Agreed, I guess my point in my original comment is; yes, bandwidth is cheap but you aren’t going to compete at any scale hosting at OVH as was proposed. And you’ll need a lot more than cheap VMs too.

Aerroon 2y ago

Are they actually unmetered or are they unmetered*? * up to 2TB per month

immibis 2y ago
It's unmetered* * if our upstream is saturated we're going to look at our biggest users and if the number is really big we'll send them a polite email to please reduce it or pay more. There are reports of people getting emails from Hetzner after sending multiple Gbps continuously for several months. That's the level you have to reach before the * kicks in. Only 1Gbps servers are unmetered, so you'd have to have several. If you want to know a better approximation of their true cost just look at their non-unlimited plans: 20TB/month included for free; 1€/TB (excl VAT) after that. I have one more interesting data point to add: I was quoted 950€/month for a dedicated 10Gbps between Berlin and Amsterdam (about 600km) plus peering at AMS-IX, or 300€ for 1Gbps. (They're not secretive and you can just ask for a quote using their sales contact form). Extrapolating, it seems that 1€ is worth about 2.5 petabyte-kilometers, at least within the dense interconnections of continental Europe. About twice the price of shipping a petabyte of hard drives the same distance.
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  > If you want to know a better approximation of their true cost just look at their non-unlimited plans: 20TB/month included for free; 1€/TB (excl VAT) after that. I will point out that this is still about 50x-80x cheaper than Amazon. Not far off the claim of 100x.
  - immibis 2y ago
    Mhm. Save literally 98% of your egress bill by avoiding AWS, GCP and Azure.
    - manquer 2y ago
      AWS is particularly bad at this for S3. Cloudflare and most other Object Storage Providers either fully free egress for all users or at-least for inter-cloud transit so you can then put a free/cheap CDN like Cloudflare in front and not pay all that much for b/w. AWS refuses to participate. Costs of retrieval of all data plus associated bandwidth is a so high for many people that they stick to S3 including me.
  - ec109685 2y ago
    There are enterprise plans that offer significant savings if your scale is high enough.
keepamovin 2y ago
Yes, it’s unmetered. Just colocation. You pay for the maximum rate basically not the amount sent, if that. The cloud bandwidth you get on your VPS has nothing to do with costs at the scale where you’ve racks in data centers.

mtnGoat 2y ago

But anyone doing things at great scale, isn’t going with OVH. You could use it as an origin I goes but you’d still need CDN for decent content delivery.

manquer 2y ago
Yes, at certain scale you likely have deals with many CDNs. At even higher scale (YouTube, Facebook or even Netflix ) you are going to be putting content caching servers at the local ISP PoPs : it is mutually beneficial to do so .
- mtnGoat 2y ago
  So you can piggy back on the CDNs that do the same until you can afford to do so, with the same performance. This isn’t a privilege only given to those cloud providers, anyone with a checkbook and a pulse can do it.
  - manquer 2y ago
    The key point is video streaming products are not impaired because of high cost of bandwidth, that only YouTube can only afford because Google subsidizes it from other revenue. YouTube is profitable by itself, the combination of premium and ads is more than enough to pay for it. It is hard to directly compete on long-form video because of audience and content depth advantage Google has with YouTube. There are successful niche players who are fairly large (like Vimeo or Twitch or even OnlyFans) who focus on specific markets that don't require social network advantage like corporate or smaller segments etc. For general purpose media, creators are going to focus on the platform with most audience and vice-versa, very hard to break that.
    - mtnGoat 2y ago
      Agreed, I guess my point in my original comment is; yes, bandwidth is cheap but you aren’t going to compete at any scale hosting at OVH as was proposed. And you’ll need a lot more than cheap VMs too.