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Comment by kyledrake | Hacker News Reader

There's a site on Neocities we host for free that would cost $560/mo to host on Amazon's CDN.

It costs me less than $5 with my current configuration (which is also a global CDN). It's way over our "soft limit", but it's an awesome site so I don't care. The important part is, I don't have to care.

This isn't about slightly more expensive tacos. It's about spending $560 on tacos instead of $5. "Meh" wouldn't exactly be my first reaction to getting that bill at the taco cart (or the fanciest taco place in the world, for that matter).

I can get IP transit in datacenters from $240-$600/Gb right now. So even his $960 transit cost for datacenters is off by quite a bit. He's comparing with a pretty high price and it still looks ridiculous.

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It's the drinks that are expensive, not the tacos.

And soda has a 1,150% markup [1], so it actually is like that.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/products-high-markups-2014-7

P.S. You could host it on Github for even less, if you were really price conscious.

Bandwidth is generally a necessity for cloud hosting, unlike drinks with your tacos.

Lots of bandwidth is generally only necessary for CDN. And that could be anyone.

Alright, so $560 for a soda instead of a $5 soda.

> P.S. You could host it on Github for even less.

I'm not going to attempt to save an inconsequential amount of money by hosting a site I'm hosting on another host.

But that strategy probably wouldn't end well. The $560 site uses 25x more bandwidth than Github's fairly low soft limit of 100GB (https://help.github.com/articles/what-is-github-pages/) and is likely above the 1GB site limit (which is also just the sum of any changes ever, because git) of a Github pages site.

From seeing who their CDN provider is (one that charges basically the same CDN rates as AWS), my guess is that Github is paying a lot more for CDN transit than I am. It's perhaps not a coincidence that the 100GB BW limit was quietly introduced after they started using the CDN.

Yeah Fastly (github's CDN) is ridiculously expensive and they charge for requests just like cloudfront which can become very expensive. They are the only major CDN provider other than cloud services which charges for requests.

We went from cloudfront -> edgecast -> keycdn and our bill dropped from $3000 -> $500 -> $120

Edgecast when you buy is through a reseller is quite cheap but we moved because we needed custom domain SSL which is quite expensive in edgecast

I realize this is far away from the point, but that infographic starts off stupid. Painting has a 6,000% markup? That could only possibly be true if you don't count the painter's time. Just because it's all labor doesn't mean it's high markup; the painter isn't selling you the paint he's selling you the service.

And mixed drinks are more like a 4x markup. Lower at the high end even. Not sure where they pulled that number from. If it's anything like the coffee total, they'er comparing the garbage ingredients people typically use at home against the highest quality ingredients in the best places.

Agreed. 3,900% for snow removal?

>There's a site on Neocities we host for free that would cost $560/mo to host on Amazon's CDN.

Neocities isn't just for static websites? How much traffic are getting that it would $560 on s3?

Hi Kyle. You've got me curious now, which Neocity site are you talking about, I would love to check it out.

I look forward to your promised blog posts on how you've affordably built your scalable infrastructure.

Is the basic principle to use cheap cloud VPSes or dedicated hosting (e.g. of the Digital Ocean, Hetzner, or OVH ilk)? And then you can afford lots of servers, and have then geographically distributed?

I bet that site loses money for Neocities every month. But it's subsidized by the tens of thousands of $5 sites that don't consume their allotment of resources.

Read again: it's free for the user, $5 is the cost to neocities (so yes, it looses them money. $5 a month)

Whoops. You are correct.

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