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by kmeisthax 1550 days ago
The $0.05/GB pricing cited is for CDN delivery, which implies having a bunch of servers in different areas of the world ready to deliver your files wherever they need to be.

I'm not sure which CDN. I looked at AWS EC2 and Fastly and they both cited outgoing bandwidth that was twice as high. Given that I can't find hosting providers with lower bandwidth costs, DO/Vultr either have very specific peering agreements or are subsidizing their bandwidth charges; either of which would be utterly broken by the amount of bandwidth that the person from the article appears to need for their multi-hour art tutorials.

Even if they had an amazing deal on transit, or were peered with everyone[0], and were able to provide $0.01/GB to video hosting at scale, we're still talking 20-40GB/view (assuming 45Mbps delivery of multi-hour video content). Delivering that over 800 views will run about $320 per video. Vimeo's cited custom plan pricing in the article is basically assuming a video per month on average at those rates.

[0] This is the particular reason why Google is able to provide YouTube at all. They are so big that every ISP absolutely has to peer with them, and that drives down their costs significantly.

1 comments

i have my Vultr instance running for years

it's probably using less than 10% of CPU or bandwidth most of the time

multiply it by 1000x and you can imagine how much leftover bandwidth there's left for the heavier users (beside they're not selling unlimited, you have a generous tier included and you pay extra for overages)

There's plenty of providers that can match the pricing

I've also worked for a company heavily relying on vultr and they have no problems handing high volume bandwidth (they're not as cheap as Hetzner!)