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Comment by mranton | Hacker News Reader

>Something doesn't add up here. They're actively telling third parties to lease cloud servers with large amounts of free bandwidth:

Bare-metal servers are much better is our case. Please note, bandwidth is not free. You can follow the links and see the actual price for it. If LeaseWeb tells you: 1 Gbps dedicated/unlimited per $143/month, it means you can use it 24x7.

>- They are paying the third party less than what it costs to rent the server

we don't know prices in all datacenters all over the world. That's why the _Peer_ sets the price for his service.

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> That's why the _Peer_ sets the price for his service.

But that breaks the economics of this, no? If you're in the US and charge $6/TB and I'm in Germany and charge $100/TB, why would traffic ever go to my server? If your US server gets overloaded, am I now making $100/TB? How does the network ensure that this is both fair and competitive? Moreover, how can a customer know that they're not going to get a surprise bill for an order of magnitude more than they planned for?

If someone wants to serve traffic from a peer in Germany, then they will pay you. What they are paying for with a global CDN is ultimately location.

That's the point though: not every peer can have all content, it's not a data center with a massive cache. So what's stopping me from using FUSE to make it seem like I've got petabytes of storage and throw the data in S3? Now, I never evict anything from the cache. My node is going to be far more likely to be the closest node to any given user. And so I jack up my price.

There's many variables, but the important ones for choosing a peer are cost and latency/distance. What conditions do you have for choosing far-but-cheap versus near-but-pricey? You can't simply choose peers randomly or round robin because I could just set my prices through the roof and pick up a massive paycheck.

I'm not sure I understand your thinking, here. You will set a higher price than others and win bids relative to them, somehow?

In markets, generally, providers are not chosen randomly or round-robin; they are chosen based on the balance of cost and what is offered.

A customer can switch on/off regions. Also, they can set up a cap for every region. You can do it with regular CDNs as well, it's just a setting.

> If LeaseWeb tells you: 1 Gbps dedicated/unlimited per $143/month, it means you can use it 24x7.

While that is true in theory, if you in practice saturate your bandwidth 24x7 by reselling it your contract will probably get cancelled (or at least that is the case for most "unlimited" contracts).

I don't think you actually answered the questions of the parent.

That's possible true for the <50$ servers but with 143$ it's sustainable for the provider even if you use it 24/7.

Yes 0.0005$ per GB egress and a provider in Europe still makes money.

There is a difference in this case between 'unlimited' and 'unmetered'. The limit is on the throughput (1Gbps) rather than the total bandwidth which is itself naturally limited by the throughput x time.

That being said I could still see this being against TOS if you end up chewing up SSDs, hosting dodgy content or running at full power constantly.

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