[laumars]

The high bandwidth is because with cloud services like AWS and Google Cloud you'd be serving most traffic from either object storage (like S3) or their CDN. Both of which are in the same region as the DO bandwidth figure you quoted. This not only reduces your compute bandwidth costs but also drastically improves your application performance when under load (and as an added bonus you also reduce your compute CPU costs since they're not serving up static content).

I've found even some relatively simple infrastructures (2x web servers, 1x database server + some extra caching services), AWS actually worked out cheaper than Digital Ocean. The problem is you'd have to approach hosting on platforms like AWS slightly differently than you'd approach hosting on the likes of Digital Ocean. But once you start scaling your application, you'll soon find that you'll want to adopt the aforementioned topology anyway regardless of arguments about AWS/Google/etc vs Digital Ocean.

[mluggy]

S3 is $0.023/GB (still x4 higher), plus $0.004 per 10K requests CloudFront is $0.085/GB, plus $0.0075-$0.01 per 10K requests) GCP is $0.08-0.12/GB (same for all services), plus $5 per 1M requests) And who says most of the bandwidth goes towards static assets? 99% of our requests are dynamic (thus the NodeJS frontends)

[laumars]

> And who says most of the bandwidth goes towards static assets?

It obviously depends on the application but generally you'd expect that to be the case for web sites (ie not services that act only as an API backend).

> 99% of our requests are dynamic (thus the NodeJS frontends)

I don't know your business so you might be transferring more dynamic data rather than static but your argument here doesn't help explain your business as you're mixing metaphors. eg most of our requests are dynamic as well but JSON APIs will generally return smaller chunks of data compared to an image. So in real bandwidth terms on our application, more data is transferred for static content rather than dynamic. None of the static content touches our web servers though. In fact a fair amount of the dynamic content doesn't either since a lot of that isn't user specific so is served from caching services.

If you don't mind me asking, how much bandwidth you transfer each month? Even taking the above into account, our bandwidth costs (which is nothing compared to when we self-hosted) gets dwarfed by our computing costs (VMs and DB).

By the way, how are you finding node.js for your workload? I find it a weird choice if 99% of your requests are dynamic based on bottlenecks I've experienced when deploying test systems on it. But I ask about your experiences because I've not used node.js for anything at scale (ie just a few thousand requests a second).

[kuschku]

I’m not the one you responded to, but, I wanted to share my data:

I’ve had months where I’ve transferred above 180TB of data, at an overall cost of below 40€ in that month, with dedicated servers at a European hoster.