[echelon]

$0.01/GB is fantastic, but I have a bandwidth intensive ML media application and don't know how to monetize or sell it quickly enough to pay for my bandwidth costs.

Is there a cloud or dedicated server farm with even cheaper outbound bandwidth?

Edit: as much as I hate Oracle, their first 10TB is free, and each GB after that is $0.0085/GB. Better...

[oefrha]

If you’re okay with servers located in Germany, Hetzner is a provider I can vouch for and they offer additional egress at 1EUR/TB. 20TB included, too. (Billing has been rather painful, though.)

[Hamuko]

I have a dedicated server at Hetzner for 25 euro a month. I get an i7, 16 GB of RAM and 2x3 TB in RAID 1, which is nice since I'm hosting large media files.

I'm currently sitting at 4.2 TB of outbound traffic for the last 30 days, so I still have plenty of room to scale up my outbound traffic before I hit any limits. But most importantly my costs are fixed.

[rad_gruchalski]

How reliable do you find Hetzner servers to be?

[Hamuko]

Quite. I did have some issue with my server becoming unreachable every couple of weeks at the start of the year for a couple of times. Not sure if it was a fault that I caused or if there was some kind of a networking issue. I know I tinkered with the server a bit earlier, but it seems to have resolved itself without me really doing anything, so it could really be either way.

One problem is also that apparently some Americans have really bad peering to my server. As an European, I can't really confirm if this is the case, but it's what I've heard.

[rad_gruchalski]

Thank you

[e12e]

They've generally changed to unlimited traffic for the standard 1gbps uplink (with 1gbps guaranteed bandwidth).

Not unlimited to 10gbps - but free up to 20tb:

> Traffic usage is unlimited and free of charge. Please note that our unlimited traffic policy does not apply to servers that have the 10G uplink addon. In this special case, we will charge the usage over 20TB with € 1.00/TB. (The basis for calculation is for outgoing traffic only. Incoming and internal traffic is not calculated.) There is no bandwidth limitation.

[vidarh]

Can also vouch for Hetzner. Used them at several companies and they've always been pleasant to deal with.

I've moved several people off AWS into Hetzner exactly because of their egress costs, in one case cutting their total hosting cost by 90% for that reason.

Even for people who stick with AWS and don't want to deal with any added complexity, even something as simple as putting a caching proxy in Hetzner and routing European customers to it can sometimes produce significant cost reductions.

[pnutjam]

Check out Time4vps, they have some excellent prices on storage servers and their egress is generous.

[dx034]

Never had issues with their billing. They allow usage alerts, give decent price previews and detailed invoices.

[kekub]

Besides Hetzner, I can also highly recommend netcup.eu, especially for hobby projects. Their prices are even lower and include more data volume. Their interface is not as nice as Hetzner or Digitalocean, but I am fine with that. https://www.netcup.eu/vserver/vps.php Billing: If you have access to an European bank account they offer SEPA direct debit, which works like a charm.

[pnutjam]

Have you looked at Time4vps, I have been using one of their 1TB storage servers, and I pay quarterly what netcup seems to charge monthly. It's openvz instead of kvm, but I use it to backup with rsync and borg. I also run a calibre library on mine and I've never had any issues.

[muststopmyths]

Can you elaborate why billing is a pain point ? thanks.

[oefrha]

Could not set up auto-charging, had to visit the billing portal once a month and manually initiate a Paypal or credit card transaction. Probably okay if you’re a company, not so convenient for an individual with a side project (at least I prefer set and forget).

That was two years ago though, maybe it has improved.

[enlyth]

This is only the case with PayPal, if you switch to credit card it auto charges you

[oefrha]

Hmm, weird, I believe I switched from credit card to PayPal at some point and there was no auto-charging prior to that either. Anyway, happy to be corrected.

[kirstenbirgit]

Haven't been an issue for me. I pay via credit card, no trouble.

[kavalg]

I also haven't had an issue paying by a credit card. The invoice is detailed enough too.

[tpetry]

Hetzner also has some traffic flatrate servers, but after a specific threshold your bandwidth will be capped.

[gowthamgts12]

I'm transferring out ~5TB/day and pay no charges for it. I'm using scaleway (https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/)

[nicoburns]

How are you finding the reliability. I've been hosting my personal website on ScaleWay, and there's been quite a bit of downtime (say 40 minutes every few weeks). Not a problem for my personal website, but I'm not sure I'd want to host production services on it.

[gowthamgts12]

this is indeed true earlier with C2* series instances. I used to face this problem daily, since I also used NAS. They have deprecated that dedicated box series now and currently using GP1-M which is reliable now.

[oefrha]

Would you mind sharing how much you’re spending at Scaleway each month (a ballpark would be enough)? I’m just generally wary of claims of unmetered resources at oversubscribed cloud providers — I mean if I’m paying $5/mo and transferring 150TB they probably have every incentive to cut me off. A clearly defined quota with moderate overage fees actually gives me peace of mind.

[gowthamgts12]

current monthly charges are around 300eur. totally running 3 servers.

[iddqd]

  External outgoing traffic
  First step up to 75 GB: 0 € per GB
  From 75GB to 499TB: 0.01 € per GB/month

Am I missing something?

[byefruit]

Yes, you're reading the object storage traffic section.

The servers themselves come with unlimited transfer.

[Hamuko]

That's object storage, not the servers. AFAIK, Scaleway has unlimited server traffic.

[jlgaddis]

You might want to look for a provider who is a member of the "Bandwidth Alliance" [0].

---

[0]: https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/

[JohnTHaller]

Digital Ocean's bandwidth pricing is pretty solid at $10/TB. It's pooled between droplets, too, so it's often cheaper to spool up a few droplets you're not using to get slightly better bandwidth prices if you use a lot. Sadly, I just missed out on being grandfathered in at free bandwidth, which would have been great for my PortableApps.com open source project. We'll be hitting 100 TB a month soon across all downloads.

[freedomben]

PortableApps.com looks like an interesting project. Could you give me a quick technical explanation of what it does?

[JohnTHaller]

It allows you to use Windows apps without needing to install them into Windows, so you can sync it between machines in a cloud folder like Dropbox/Google Drive, carry it on an external flash/hard drive, or use it on a machine you may not have install rights to. You can also keep separate copies of the same app for work and personal on the same Windows account. It's packaged as an app manager with a start menu, app store, automatic software updater, backup/restore functionality, etc.

On the technical side, we make use of an apps ability to direct where it stores its settings if it has one, and also move settings into/out of the registry and/or APPDATA on the local machine when needed. Our open source 'launcher' acts as a helper app to handle this for each app so it doesn't mess up a local version that's already there and so it adjusts paths if you move around between PCs and the paths to your apps or documents change.

[freedomben]

Very interesting, thank you!

[gempir]

Scaleway has 0 bandwidth fees and unlimited bandwidth.

[Nextgrid]

OVH or Soyoustart (or even Kimsufi, if you’re happy with smaller instances, no SLA and only 100Mbps) has unmetered bandwidth.

[Moru]

I haven't been shopping around for a while but most I saw in europe was "unlimited" bandwidth for most smaller accounts. We use Glesys now.