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Comment by seeekr | Hacker News Reader

Hetzner for storage and traffic, Scaleway for serving additional traffic for free, to stretch the dollar further. At 5TB you probably don't need anything but the raw file system yet, but if you do want some redundancy you could add something like Gluster on top. I'm building out a video + image processing + CDN-like aspects solution on top of such a setup and plan to offer it as SaaS in the not too distant future. Idea is to make something a lot cheaper (order of magnitude?) than currently exists on the market -- for a lot of ideas and opportunities I come across using any of the non-budget clouds/hosting providers is just not feasible financially.

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Sounds similar to fly.io

fly.io is aimed at very different use cases. It is essentially a programmable CDN, and priced like a CDN, too ($0.10/GB traffic). You would not enjoy the bill for trying to serve all of your video content through it, and you also don't get disk-based storage from them, as far as I can tell. They only have memory-based caching, which could be fine for caching the hottest of the hottest of your video (or images), but for anything else paying $6 for 100MB of cache, or $60 per GB per month, would make for insane costs.

cheaper than vimeo ?

Vimeo is not an appropriate solution for the use cases that I have in mind. I don't think Vimeo would be fine with serving dozens of TBs of traffic for you, or storing many TBs of video content. Vimeo is aimed at professionals and companies who use video as basically a marketing tool, or communication tool, or who produce very little but very high quality video that may be shown to lots or few people. But it's not meant to be something like a platform for you to build something like your own Vimeo/Youtube, where your users upload (lots of) video and also consume lots of it. Case in point: Their "business" offering website speaks about a total of 5 TB of max video storage that you get, and you get tools from Vimeo to manage that video manually. But if you're building a video platform then you need APIs first and foremost, as well as basically unlimited video storage, ie. pay by use or similar.

But if you still want to compare apples and oranges here -- yes, cheaper, or at least comparable in price, just aimed at a different (much larger scale) use case.

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