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Comment by detaro | Hacker News Reader

Bandwidth pricing is always a difficult topic. E.g. one comparison: 2 TB traffic out of AWS CloudFront is $85-120/month (first TB free, per TB cost as listed for the second TB, depending on region), and that's traffic only, no storage, processing, ... Of course AWS traffic is not exactly cheap, but Vimeo is an all-in-one service handling more than just traffic.

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But that's CloudFront, one of the most expensive CDNs out there. (And that's before considering customers like Vimeo can get special rates, even 50% off is common)

Another example on the opposite end is a host like Hetzner, where you get 20TB of traffic at 10Gb/s uplink for any cloud VM at $5+/month (or any root server at $40+/month). Comparably, AWS EC2 is $0.17/GB IIRC.

On another note -- it looks like Vimeo are using Akamai.

Cloudfront is an example for "premium B2B service", which apparently Vimeo wants to be too. So they clearly have cheaper underlying prices, and then have costs for non-bandwidth and and want to make money on top. Same way that AWS is not for everybody that means that clearly Vimeo is not for everybody who is not willing to pay premium, but for the market, it's not totally out of order.

What's the point of "premium" if you only want bits delivered at an acceptable rate?

Bunny CDN would give you 2TB for about 20 bucks/month.

I know you'd then have to use your own website/player but that's not really a big deal, most people that use Vimeo have a website anyway, it's not that hard to code an <embed> tag ...

I don't think this was a good move by Vimeo, but maybe they're doing so bad (financially, as I think their product is great) that they don't really have a choice.

The problem with comparing themselves with cloudflare/bunnycdn is that Vimeo is making big chunk of their money on "pro" creators who pay 20 bucks for what would be 0,5 usd costs those CDNs have. They have few videos with few streams - but Vimeo is their portfolio. They are limited by monthly upload sizes but thats all.

I really think this shift is not smart one for them. Because these creators will move especially once they realize they would pay 3usd on cloudflare. And cloudflare/bunny smartly include pretty similar upload area and even videoplayers/iframes so there is not much difference to vimeo for these "creative pros".

Cloudflare charges by the minutes delivered though, so if one of your videos unexpectedly gets popular, your monthly bill might spike up. That's a scary level of unpredictability when you're a small team (or lone wolf) that doesn't know ahead of time how viral a video would get.

It’s not fair to compare premium cloud providers with dollar store providers like Hetzner. Especially if you’re going to ignore the cost of paying someone to set up and maintain that infrastructure, which is easily more than $3500/yr.

I didn't think it was fair to use CloudFront as the only example for CDN pricing, when it's one of the more expensive ones. Granted, I used an extreme counter-example but the point was that implying "this customer costs them $80-$120/month" is misleading (and wrong).

You can't compare Hetzner boxes with CDNs. Imagine someone trying to stream a 4K video from your Hetzner box in Finland to Australia. Not the same as directly from local CDN node

Not the same, but I wanted to present the counter-point that bandwidth in general is not as expensive as AWS and such make it out to be. Hetzner is an extreme counter-example but I thought that just using CloudFront's pricing in this thread is misleading as well.

How so? What's a few hundred extra milleseconds for packets to transfer when you're streaming video with many seconds of buffer time?

That is a very idealistic view of networking

You can do it as easily with a bunch of cloudflare boxes hosted at strategic points around the globe.

That Hetzner price doesn't include acceptable peering with Telekom (Germany's largest telco), I can only imagine how bad the international peering will be.

There are plenty of cloud providers without insane bandwidth fees, or Vimeo could host their services on premise.

Netflix doesn't stream content from AWS, Vimeo needs a more cost effective architecture.

I didn't claim Vimeo uses AWS.

I was just pointing to an example of not streaming from the cloud. Vimeo uses a combination of GCP and Fastly I believe https://cloud.google.com/customers/vimeo

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