[010a]

I'm not so sure. $33M would buy 412PB of egress alone. At 160M daily active users, that's roughly 2GB per user. In just bandwidth. That's high, and they've probably negotiated some deals to lower their bills, but also consider instances, storage (photos and videos), 10% of their bill is easily support...

$33M a month is the right magnitude. The more I think about it, the more I wonder if it's actually way too low, and they're getting really deep discounts.

[patrickg_zill]

I was just offered 1 gigabit unmetered for $500/month in the Denver colo I run my servers in. I have to be sure, that Google gets their bandwidth for far, far less!

Which means, 50 cents per Mbps/per month. Usually a 1Mbps means about 190GB of transfer over the course of a month, I think. So 1000 * 190GB = 0.190 PB per month.

412PB thus means ~ 2200 Gbit/s . Under my pricing, I get a whole lot less than $33M / month.

So, does your calculation involve storing that same 412PB?

[010a]

No. In what world would Snapchat be paying the rates that you pay at your Denver colo center? Why is that even relevant? They pay what Google charges them, which is $0.08/GB egress. Probably less due to negotiated bulk discounts.

[patrickg_zill]

8 cents per GB is thus approximately $15 per Mbps (8 cents time 190)that Snap is paying, while Google is paying far less than 50 cents per Mbps.

Is my math off?

[late2part]

Your units are off.

If I push 1 GB per month, https://www.google.com/search?q=1GB%2Fmonth+in+mbps&oq=1GB%2...

You can assume they are not paying list rate when they buy $400M of service.

If they push ~40gbps on average, that's 13PB - https://www.google.com/search?q=40gbps+*+30+days+in+PB&oq=40...

13PB is 13M GB. 13M GB @ .08/GB = $1.04M

$1.04M/40gbps = 1.04M/40000 = $26/Mbps.

I pay less than a 10th of that outside.

[tonfa]

You colo bandwidth is likely not from a global CDN with hundreds of PoP: https://peering.google.com/#/infrastructure

[patrickg_zill]

Bandwidth is bandwidth these days. Plenty of companies like Internap are out there that can help you with low latency bandwidth, especially when you are spending a lot.

But given that Snap could be anywhere in the USA, they could locate their servers anywhere. I wasn't pushing Denver, or the colo I am in, as the solution.

It's just kind of shocking that people are willing to pay 20 times or more the going rate for bandwidth...