[ghshephard]

Whenever anybody makes this type of statement, I'm alway interested in knowing if they've ever run a site with this type of traffic, and this many customers.

In particular, have you ever run a site that consistently serves over 25 Terabytes of traffic/month, or have you worked with someone who has?

I guarantee you that no company I have worked for in the last 15 years, could have ever run this type of infrastructure for $7K/month. Its absolutely amazing.

[Zarel]

My site serves 25 TB/mo, and it costs me $80/mo...

$60/mo for a dedicated server, $20/mo for CloudFlare. The dedicated server only serves 1 TB of it, the other 24 TB is static assets cached and served directly by CloudFlare.

Here's a screenshot of CloudFlare Analytics for the last 30 days: http://d.pr/i/6Z8S/5GU2Ni8t

[ghshephard]

Thanks - that's eye opening.

So, what this really comes down to (after a good nights sleep) - is what type of traffic/transactions are you running on your back end infrastructure.

If the data is static, then you can probably (these days) cut your costs for 25 Terabytes/month from $8K to $800 (or, in your extraordinary case, $80), simply by being a bit intelligent as to how you make use of VPS/CDN/CloudFlare Transfer allocations.

On the flip side, if much of the data you are transferring out is the result of dynamic back end transactions, queries, and generation, then it's unclear to me that you can (easily) recognize the savings that you might see when generating static content.

I'm interested in knowing if CloudFlare will start throttling/shutting down people who pay $20 and use 25 TBytes in the long term though - that alone, for some organizations, will cost them more than the extra $8K they would pay to AWS (who, have zero problem with you using 25TB, 250TB, 2.5PB, etc...)

[Zarel]

Yeah, I'll admit that other CloudFlare customers are likely subsidizing the amount of bandwidth I'm using.

Funny thing - back when I was using 10 TB/mo, my site was hosted entirely on DreamHost's $9/mo shared hosting. I moved mostly because I was starting to get several hours a month of downtime - presumably, they were gently nudging me off their service.

I've seen plenty of $60-$100 dedicated servers come with unlimited-use 100Mbit connections, which work out to 16ish TB/mo before you start getting to 50% saturation. Of course, those are still subsidized in that that pricing is possible only because most people who buy it don't max out a 100Mbit connection.

Still, though, S3's 9-12¢/GB bandwidth pricing seems a bit high. Bandwidth at DigitalOcean (presumably unsubsidized) is 2¢/GB, which comes out to a much more manageable $500 for 25 TB.

With dynamic content, CloudFlare has Railgun, which takes advantage of the fact that dynamic content is usually mostly static. Still, though, if you have 25 TB of dynamic content, I presume bandwidth stops becoming the limiting factor in your cost of operation.

[hackerboos]

CloudFlare cannot be making money on you as a customer. $20 for 24TB is too cheap.

[ceejayoz]

It's offset by the many customers paying $20 and using 1 GB, I'd imagine.

[gaadd33]

I'm not sure if RubyGems gets more traffic/has more intense computational needs/has more users than OkCupid, but that used to be hosted for about ~2-3K/mo from what I recall. However, that's not amortizing the cost of the hardware.

[toomuchtodo]

> I guarantee you that no company I have worked for in the last 15 years, could have ever run this type of infrastructure for $7K/month. Its absolutely amazing.

True, but lets not compare offerings of the past to now. There is still room for practical efficiency gains.

[adrianpike]

Are you including person costs in that $7k? If so, I totally agree.

[ghshephard]

Only the person costs associated with the configuration/management of the servers - not the people time associated with the code, and high level system administration (which you still need with AWS).

I.E. The people who bought the servers, racked the servers, went down to the CoLo at night, set up the virtualization environment, hooked up the routers, configured the routers, the switches, the firewalls, the vlans -- those people I am including.

I'm not including the DBAs who manage the schema, people who push the code, do the design, etc...

[ilaksh]

Have you worked for Rackspace, Linode or Digital Ocean?

[ghshephard]

I've worked for one of their (direct) large competitors, but haven't worked for those three companies.

I've currently got active accounts with all three of those VPS providers - I love them, and use them every day - particularly Linode, but also Slicehost/Rackspace, and DigitalOcean. I even have a bare metal server at ServerBeach - which I realize I need to shut down...

At this exact instant I have six terminal windows open across DO/Linode. I host a moderately popular California Food Blog, and have about 15 years experience in various companies that have had hosting responsibilities.

I'm not saying you can't do great things with the VPS providers - I'm just suggesting that the tradeoff between saving $2-$3k (at most) with Digital Ocean, would be more than made up by the technology risk, hassle of having to re-invent a lot of the services that you get automatically from AWS.

That could change sometime in the (near) future - but right now, AWS is an easy (and honestly, all things considered, relatively cheap) solution for this type of application.

[ilaksh]

But they are just using Amazon's Cloudfront. They aren't using SQS or anything.

What technology risk is there in setting up Varnish and nginx on Digital Ocean? Or better yet some kind of out-of-the-box open source CDN. You would save a lot more than $2-3k.

[ghshephard]

I'm referring to Digital Ocean's technology. AWS (and Media Temple) had it's teething pains as well in it's first 4-5 years. I remember some fairly broad outages with their back end storage - but they've mostly dealt with those, and, the risk has gone down.

Note - there is another option - Deploy on multiple Platforms and be smart with your DNS balancing (http://www.dnsmadeeasy.com/services/global-traffic-director/) when serving content. Particularly now that Digital Ocean is in Singapore/Amsterdam/NewYork I can think of some useful things I could do with $10/month droplet (2 Terabytes of Transfer) $300/month, in theory, gets me 20 Terabytes in Asia, 20 Terabytes in Europe, 20 Terabytes in North America. Now, whether DO would shut me down if I actually started using that Transfer is another question altogether...

[ksec]

Last test i tested DNS balancing ( from DNSMadeEasy )sometimes doesn't work as well as you did imagined, at least compared to EdgeCast or MaxCDN. Although that is quite long ago.

Would love to see any recent input.

[toomuchtodo]

There is no such thing as an open source CDN; there is a free CDN called Coral Cache (http://www.coralcdn.org/). CDNs cost money because you're dragging content from an origin to edge locations all across the world, and keeping it hot for client requests.

You could simply serve the content out of nginx, but you wouldn't see the performance benefits of keeping your content closest to the end user.