[0xbadcafebee]

I don't know if you remember back when service providers would put customers' entire dataset on a single set of spinning platters. The drive would of course die and the customer would get super pissed off when the provider would say "You were supposed to keep a backup..." So now providers like GitHub and GitLab are basically super-redundant storage, network, and application providers, who also happen to run Git.

If you store 50GB in AWS S3 (US-East-2), download 1000GB, do 100 PUT operations and 1000 GET operations, the cost is $89.68 per month.

Considering that GitHub isn't just providing you with storage, but a complete Git LFS solution plus storage, plus traffic that you can just use and not think about, I think it's worth the expense. But then again I probably wouldn't store binary blobs in Git.

[Dylan16807]

The number you're citing is basically entirely bandwidth, which has two main problems.

One is that amazon has an enormous markup on bandwidth, compared to their other products.

The other is that GitHub does not actually let you download each file 20x in a month and "not think about" it. 50GB of space for a month only gets you 50GB of bandwidth.

If Amazon didn't explicitly ban people from using Lightsail bandwidth with other services, you could put together an all-AWS package that has 150GB of high quality S3 storage and enough bandwidth to download it 2-3x per $5 (minimum order quantity 2). For a service like B2 you could store 250GB twice (each copy having its own cross-server RAID) and download it once for $5. At digitalocean $5 will get you 250GB of probably-redundant data with 1TB of bandwidth, though it eventually tapers off toward 167GB/$5.