[capableweb]

> Egress bandwidth in a datacenter costs around $7/TB for you or me, probably far less for a company like Cloudflare that's built around handling huge traffic volumes.

Funny thing, paying for egress bandwidth is not something you do if you handle your own peering and other internet infrastructure. Paying for bandwidth is something that the cloud providers came up with to add further margin. So they likely pay $0/TB for that bandwidth.

[mmastrac]

CloudFlare has a good blog post on this, but effectively they pay for megabit/s capability.

[wongarsu]

Which is not that different from paying by the TB, as long as you are big enough that your traffic isn't too spiky. If you assume that over the day/week Cloudflare's your bandwidth usage moves between 0.5x and 1.5x of the monthly average, then paying for 1 TB/month is basically the same as paying for 4.5 megabit/s (1TB/month == 3Mb/s, multiply by 1.5 for peak demand).