Ask HN: How do you circumvent low upload bandwidth limits in the US? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you circumvent low upload bandwidth limits in the US?

4 pointsdwrodri6 comments

I'm trying to build a bit of a homelab at my apartment in the US (East Coast), but there just aren't any ISPs which offer good upload bandwidth in my area.

I find myself often wanting to move around 5-250GB of data, and I'm looking for a way to do that quickly.

I can think of two approaches:

1) Rent a cloud instance, and use their high bandwidth connection. 2) Rent a bare metal server, and use their high bandwidth connection.

What service would you recommend for solving this problem? My two main use cases would be: 1) Download files quickly to the server. 2) Send files quickly from this server to another device.

The cloud computing is full of so many different services that I'm having a hard time even comparing a cheap linux server to something offered by a cloud provider. Does anyone have any recommendations?

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What are you uploading? Where is the original source for the content being uploaded?

Getting a high speed connection from a virtual server sitting somewhere in the cloud or at a VPS provider isn’t going to help you, if the original content lives on your laptop. You still have to get that content up to the high bandwidth system, and so you haven’t changed the bottleneck — your upstream connection from your home network.

If that’s the use case, then you might want to look into getting a business class connection, since they’re usually set up for symmetric upload and download rates, although they are also usually a lot more expensive.

I'm thinking that I can use the server as a high bandwidth cache for large files; I'd schedule uploads overnight to the server and then make them available to myself + others who have asymmetric connections.

A lot of what I'm moving that is datasets for machine learning projects: which can be 100s of GBs of images/videos.

Depending on what you’d like to do with it, you could get a server at a hosting provider that allows you to send in USB sticks with data and uploads it for you (makre sure the content is encrypted though) or get a colo with your own server which you then would have access to.

If you just need it as a cache as mentioned in another comment, you can go with a VPS

I've used Linode and Vultr for many years with great results. They are both reliable and have very cheap plans with high bandwidth speeds and limits. They are also a lot easier to configure vs messing with real hardware (which I used to do in a former life).

I guess it depends on where and how you want to move it. I'm only a bit familiar with AWS. You could look at EC2, ECS, S3 (or others?) with Storage Gateway (I think).

What about a business connection? If affordable.

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