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Comment by Samin100 | Hacker News Reader

Last month Lexica served a little over 1 billion images and the Cloudflare bill (I'm using R2 + workers) was a little over $5k. I've since gotten it down to a more reasonable amount after spending some time to re-encode the images to reduce our bandwidth usage significantly. If Lexica were running on AWS/S3 I imagine our first month's bill would be closer to $100k rather than $5k. This is only image serving, so not including costs to run the beefy CPU servers to run CLIP search, frontend, DB, backend, etc.

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Why not go with a server or two or some VMs on Hetzner/Kimsufi/OVH/Netcup/BuyVM etc where they have very generous included transfer or even unmetered (BuyVM) ?

I get it that everyone wants to use the trendy newest tech (workers etc or whatever the latest is), but your bill could easily be 20% (or less) of the $5k kind of numbers you are mentioning.

I guess if those kind of numbers are just water under the bridge for you than you may as well go with the easier cloud setup/infra though.

Having used many different providers (though not all of the ones on your list), be very careful with suspiciously generous or unmetered anything. More often than not, you'll hit a soft limit where your performance will degrade and/or you'll get kicked for ToS violations.

Most apps never hit those limits, but once you get to multi-thousands/mo in cloud bills, there's benefits in pay-as-you-go billing where the provider is incentivized to let you use as much as you want to pay for.

> More often than not, you'll hit a soft limit where your performance will degrade and/or you'll get kicked for ToS violations.

Hetzner does have truly unmetered root servers, been using it myself for years. If you're doing Tor, Torrents or commercial CDN traffic, they might kick you out, but for other "normal" things, they seem to have no issues with handling it as they say they will.

Besides search and image listing, what other plans do you have with Lexica? Also, do you plan to open-source anything of it?

Weird 1billion 50k request ends up about 5k on the cloudfront pricing calculator. Do you have a bandwidth estimate? Idk how you got that 100k quote

What is the bandwidth like? I guess something in the order of a few 100 TB? Perhaps you can host this from a an "unmetered" server for $50 per month. Not sure how high your peak loads are though.

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