[PaulHoule]

I can't imagine that it is.

Let's say a paper is 1 MB, downloading it 1,000 times costs 10 cents at AWS prices. 10,000 lifetime views would be a lot for an arXiv paper, and that is $1. Plus storing 1,000 papers at that rate is another 10 cents a month. Storing a million papers is $100 a month.

The thing people miss about AWS's charging for bandwidth is that it's an efficient way to lower their costs handling DMCA requests. You might get 20,000 downloads of a 2 GB camcorder capture of a movie in the theaters -- the prospect of a $4000 bill to do do that encourages people to use other platforms instead. AWS doesn't have their legal department running big bills dealing with this and they pass on the savings and the generally safer environment to do whatever it is you are doing w/o harassment to their customers.

[LyndsySimon]

COS’s platform, the Open Science Framework, hosts large amounts of data in addition to the preprint itself. It’s more of a “scientific workflow platform” than a “preprint service”.

[abought]

Per the budget spreadsheet linked elsewhere, preprints seem to be 20+% of site traffic, but only 0.4-1% of storage costs for the overall site.

This could indicate that many preprints are posted as standalone artifacts (eg not every preprint would include rich datasets alongside the PDF). In effect, people could be skipping the workflow and just using it for the preprint.

For bandwidth usage, they're estimating 20-25% of site traffic. Hosting costs are not a trivial expense, but they're not the main driver of the budget, and the bigger uncertainty seems to be on labor costs.