[ghshephard]

Given that a VPS like Digital Ocean will give you 1 Terabyte/month for $5/month, isn't it straightforward to hose your own tarball now?

I see the nmap tarball is 20 Megabytes = 50,000 downloads.

The cost of hosting should be easily covered by your user base.

[K0nserv]

DigitalOcean feels wrong for this purpose since they provided VPS not storage per se. I would suggest hosting the website on Digital Ocean, github or something similar and hosting files on S3 or some similar service that specializes in storing files rather than providing VPSs.

[corobo]

The problem isn't really in the overall bandwidth usage though, it's the concurrency.

Would the $5/month droplet stand up to a surge of people coming in for a latest release, or a bit of press coverage? Would there be enough bandwidth that everyone gets the file fast or would they all slow to a crawl

[leojfc]

What about providing a BitTorrent link? The main server could provide a backstop seed, and presumably enough other people would seed too for any decent-sized project.

[swhipple]

P2P downloads would help cover some of the costs, but popular projects probably need a direct download link with load balancing as well.

If the project doesn't want to manage their own infrastructure, they're probably going to want a CDN or object storage provider. The most cost-friendly I've seen is OVH's RunAbove object storage, but I'd be interested to know if there is anything else comparable.

[Grue3]

50000 downloads is ridiculously low for any popular software package. Besides, VPS are not that fast at serving static files as you think. My VPS-hosted site became like 10x as fast when I made it pull 100kb-ish javascript files from a CDN instead of off VPS harddrive.

[pjc50]

Do users pay anything at all? Or enough to cover that trivial cost?

[antihero]

Oh bollocks, I thought by 1TB/month you meant in storage, not bandwidth!