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Comment by manishsharan | Hacker News Reader

If you ever get the itch to run this on AWS cloud, just don't. I ran Jitsi ( the whole system) on AWS on-demand EC2 for my Kid's class to collaborate on their projects during Covid lockdown (in Toronto) and it burnt a hole in my wallet. Not prophbitively expensive but still. So now I advise them to use Google Hangouts or Zoom. I often wonder how much Zoom and its competitors pay for bandwidth.

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Very little, because AWS and GCP bandwidth costs are marked up by over 1000%.

Cloud services are sold the way drugs are.

The first hit is free. But after a tiny bit of, uh, scaling you're going to be ripping copper out of abandoned houses to make ends meet.

Do you happen to have the bill/invoice still? I'd love to see some real numbers, and try a bit of back-of-napkin comparison with digital ocean, scaleway, hetzner cloud - and in particular hetzner dedicated. The latter does cost a bit if you need 10gps uplink - but otherwise you could go far with a "second hand" auctioned server - free/included bandwidth (1gbps) and no setup fee. I suppose for the US market one might want to look at ovh as well.

Some competitors like Cisco opt to deploy their own AS (Webex is AS13445) optimized towards eyeball networks because capacity and latency to Google and Amazon can be tricky with some incumbents. So they generally have good control over their cost this way.

Yes, it's much more affordable to use a host like linode which can provide more reasonable rates.

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