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Somewhat relatedly, how do the economics for Huggingface work? They must be hosting petabytes of models and datasets by now. I have downloaded quite a few “just

Somewhat relatedly, how do the economics for Huggingface work? They must be hosting petabytes of models and datasets by now. I have downloaded quite a few “just in case”, only to replace them with the later iteration months later. Does the file hosting actually cost peanuts when you do it yourself and the cloud has shattered my understanding of what it actually costs to deliver so much data?

jvuygbbkuurx 2mo ago
Maybe download numbers are relatively low
- rupx 2mo ago
  Download numbers are reported on the site, and they aren't low. CDN costs are pennies compared to inference and training though, HuggingFace will just get another 100 million and be set.
lima 2mo ago
Bandwidth is really cheap when you run your own infra
- miyuru 2mo ago
  when trying to download models using browser, the DL domain for me us.aws.cdn.hf.co which points to bunch of singapore AWS IPv4 for me, despite it saying US.
- himata4113 2mo ago
  It's not only cheap, it's actually free since if you are not using your 95th percentile you are losing money.
  - Scoundreller 2mo ago
    Some enterprising ISPs get into the hosting business because most of their traffic is ingress, so adding some egress revenue is effectively zero cost.
wongarsu 2mo ago
File hosting is pretty cheap. Egress traffic is about $90/TB in the cloud, but around $1/TB in the real world. Storage is in the realm of $5/TB/month after adding redundancy At the scale of Huggingface, that still amounts to a lot load of money. Significantly less than if you did the same in AWS, but still a lot That said, they do have a deal with AWS to make the data available in AWS ip space. Maybe they got some cheap hosting out of that too
- oceanplexian 2mo ago
  It's less than $1/TB. If you have settlement-free peering it's like fractions of a penny at scale. Cloud provider DTO pricing is literally the biggest scam on Earth.
  - gandreani 2mo ago
    What does DTO mean in this case? And settlement-free peering? I didn't know the price for S3 could be so cheap with AWS
    - deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
  - flyingpenguin 2mo ago
    My company spends $8,000,000/month on storage and $4,000,000/month on data with aws... In the financial reports we do we round this number away. Make of that what you will
    - Bayart 2mo ago
      "Nobody ever got fired for buying AWS."
anon373839 2mo ago
HF uses chunk-level deduplication that greatly reduces the amount of physical storage needed for a given amount of logical storage. https://huggingface.co/docs/xet/en/deduplication https://huggingface.co/docs/xet/en/deduplication
Bayart 2mo ago
Nowadays storage and bandwidth is cheap as long as you're not going through a hyperscaler and it doesn't require compute (ie. "dead" data). I'm working mostly on GCP so I'm not sure what are the rates now, but at least AWS were known for billing insane numbers on egress. As long as you're smart on caching on the edges and deduplication/overlaying with your content (which structured data types like models, containers and repos typically are fit for) you can get remarkably far for less than you'd think. The economics of serving models seem to be way more dodgy.

jvuygbbkuurx 2mo ago

Maybe download numbers are relatively low

rupx 2mo ago
Download numbers are reported on the site, and they aren't low. CDN costs are pennies compared to inference and training though, HuggingFace will just get another 100 million and be set.

lima 2mo ago

Bandwidth is really cheap when you run your own infra

miyuru 2mo ago
when trying to download models using browser, the DL domain for me us.aws.cdn.hf.co which points to bunch of singapore AWS IPv4 for me, despite it saying US.
himata4113 2mo ago
It's not only cheap, it's actually free since if you are not using your 95th percentile you are losing money.
- Scoundreller 2mo ago
  Some enterprising ISPs get into the hosting business because most of their traffic is ingress, so adding some egress revenue is effectively zero cost.

wongarsu 2mo ago

File hosting is pretty cheap. Egress traffic is about $90/TB in the cloud, but around $1/TB in the real world. Storage is in the realm of $5/TB/month after adding redundancy At the scale of Huggingface, that still amounts to a lot load of money. Significantly less than if you did the same in AWS, but still a lot That said, they do have a deal with AWS to make the data available in AWS ip space. Maybe they got some cheap hosting out of that too

oceanplexian 2mo ago
It's less than $1/TB. If you have settlement-free peering it's like fractions of a penny at scale. Cloud provider DTO pricing is literally the biggest scam on Earth.
- gandreani 2mo ago
  What does DTO mean in this case? And settlement-free peering? I didn't know the price for S3 could be so cheap with AWS
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
- flyingpenguin 2mo ago
  My company spends $8,000,000/month on storage and $4,000,000/month on data with aws... In the financial reports we do we round this number away. Make of that what you will
  - Bayart 2mo ago
    "Nobody ever got fired for buying AWS."

anon373839 2mo ago

HF uses chunk-level deduplication that greatly reduces the amount of physical storage needed for a given amount of logical storage. https://huggingface.co/docs/xet/en/deduplication https://huggingface.co/docs/xet/en/deduplication

Bayart 2mo ago

Nowadays storage and bandwidth is cheap as long as you're not going through a hyperscaler and it doesn't require compute (ie. "dead" data). I'm working mostly on GCP so I'm not sure what are the rates now, but at least AWS were known for billing insane numbers on egress. As long as you're smart on caching on the edges and deduplication/overlaying with your content (which structured data types like models, containers and repos typically are fit for) you can get remarkably far for less than you'd think. The economics of serving models seem to be way more dodgy.