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Comment by defen | Hacker News Reader

7 Gigabits/second...can someone translate that into a dollar amount for me?

7 Gb/s * 0.125GB/Gb * 86,400s/d * 30d/mo * 0.0009765625TB/GB = 2215TB/month to 738TB/month ("20,000 users at night", 1/3 peak usage - 8hrs)

> That’s why I have put only four links on the bottom as advertisements. And what is interesting, is that these advertisements almost cover all expenses, just those four links on the bottom!

EDIT: I give up on the conversion

I went to a talk once with Jeff Barr of Amazon Web Services. The owners of SmugMug charge all of their AWS on a corporate credit card. We're talking multiple roundtrip tickets from bonus points a month.

It's just over 200 terabytes.

http://www.google.com/search?q=0.7+gigabit%2Fsecond+*+86400+...

I've seen traffic advertised at €15/TB in Germany, that's €3.000/month.

EDIT: I screwed the units up a few times, sorry

You can simplify your query by letting Google do the units conversion. Eg, search for:

    86400 seconds/day + 1

To get the same result as your link google:

    0.7 gigabit/second * 30 days

Or even:

    0.7 gigabit/second * 1 month

Or ask WA: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=7Gb%2Fs+to+TB%2Fmonth

7Gbits/s saturated over a month is 2,247 TB

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=7Gb%2Fs+in+TB%2Fmon...

So at your €15/TB i would be €33,705 / month

Also €15/TB seems low as prices around the US are $0.10/GB so $100/TB which would equate to around $200k/month

Of course when you are pushing that much data you're going to want to pay per Mbit/s and with bandwidth as low as $3/Mbit we get around $21,000/month

What is probably happening here is that this guy has 7 dedicate servers at about $150 each per month that have a gigabit connection with say a couple of TB data allowance for each server and he's just saying that he has a capacity of 7Gb/s. The chat client is probably peer to peer so the video bandwidth for him is not that critical.

> 7Gbits/s saturated over a month is 2,247 TB

Even the best calculation is wrong when you plug in the wrong friggin data... I confused myself from converting gbit to GB and ended up with 0.7 gbit instead of 7 .. :-S

> Also €15/TB seems low

That's why I do business with them :) It's hetzner.de, and their "rootserver" (€49/month and up) comes with 2.000 GB free traffic. Extra is free, but capped at 10 mbit, or €14.90/TB. The servers are connected at 100 mbit, though. I'd guess that's just to keep the ethernet infrastructure cheap, and a gbit connection would be possible for a fee.

I'm not affiliated with them, just a happy customer.

This number is bogus. Why?

He uses consumer servers. Each server has a maximum of one gigabit ethernet connect. Like providers counting all their network interfaces together to have a high marketing number like "12321 Gbit/s backbone" that's just a number.

See my upcoming comment in the NYT blog about that.

I am not sure the TB/month figure quoted by others is a price that would scale to this level. As a new start-up without the ability/desire to commit for a year or any credit rating, you are likely to be paying about $6 per Mbps per month. As a reference for this price in July 2008, Cogent took the bottom out of the transit bandwidth market by offering $7 per Mbps (dropping to $6 for 1Gbps committ) - (see http://connectedplanetonline.com/mag/telecom_cogent_throws_d...). Prices may have dropped a bit in the last 15 months, but not by that much.

So at 7000 Mbps/second - I'd put the price at more like $42k per month.

Is it not possible to have flash directly connect with another flash user instead of routing all the traffic through central servers?

NAT/Firewalls are a bitch. I'm not a Flash expert, but as far as I know it can only open TCP connections, and only to specially set up servers (which respond positively to a policy request on a certain port). Punching holes in firewalls is pretty much a UDP-only thing in practice; Skype is one of the few apps that truly pull it off, and even that's not 100% reliable.

You could in theory do it with a signed Java applet, though it will ask the user for permission for access to his entire computer, and it's not something you'd throw together in a few weeks.

It looks like Flash 10.1 added something built in to do the UDP-firewall-punching and connection setup for peer-to-peer video between Flash clients: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/stratus/

No idea if that's what he's using or he rolled his own. Using Stratus seems like the most obvious option, but it looks like it's limited beta only, and the beta EULA prohibits commercial use, so if he's using it, it's unofficially.

From my experience a couple of years ago, no, not without installing an extension to flash.

The cheapest bandwidth most can buy is about 2-3$ per mb/s in the US. Likely to be more expensive in europe.

That would mean each gigabit would cost between 2k-3k USD.

That adds up to around $5 billion a month. I think your estimate is a bit off ;-)

He probably means "2-3$ per megabit/sec".

So $14,000 - $21,000 per month. Still seems too much.

You can get a TB traffic for 15€ (Gigabit port) in Europe.

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