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Comment by mtnGoat | Hacker News Reader

But anyone doing things at great scale, isn’t going with OVH. You could use it as an origin I goes but you’d still need CDN for decent content delivery.

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Anyone doing things at great scale is buying many-gigabit connections directly. Which is also 100x cheaper than AWS.

The number above was a thousand dollars per month per 10gbps, and AWS would charge more than a hundred thousand dollars at the listed $0.05/GB price.

Note: that was for a dedicated 10-gigabit link from specific location A to specific location B, plus a peering at one large IX, without any access to the rest of the internet.

Nonetheless it does give a ballpark for the cost of bandwidth being a lot lower than people think. A 10G internet connection would be cheaper to provide in some parts of that equation and more expensive in others - should end up in the same ballpark.

By "above" I meant ckdarby's number.

And honestly 10 cents per Mbps sounds kind of high for raw transit, I interpreted it as a price for actual utilization.

It was more than 5 years ago and was not a direct commitment. Another company was being used for their data centers, and this was a lease/rental agreement of equipment; Think colocation model, but where you're like 50-80% of being the main client of the data centers.

Add 10-25% profit for that company to get closer to true "raw transit" pricing from the carriers directly.

Also, can you show me any public pricing that is 100x cheaper than AWS? With same QOS! Or are you just throwing numbers around?

What specifically is the QOS for AWS?

But sure, if you want citations for $0.10 per Mbps in bulk for transit, that's easy to find/beat.

https://he.net/ "Get BGP+IPv6+IPv4 for $0.06/Mbps!"

https://www.fdcservers.net/ip-transit Europe, North America: 10Gbps $499/month

And telegeography just sells information, but they had a blog post that's now three years out of date reporting that "In Q2 2021, the lowest 10 GigE prices on offer were at the brink of $0.09 per Mbps per month. The lowest for 100 GigE were $0.06 per Mbps per month."

You need to factor in that your utilization won't be 100%, but if you're comparing 6 cents for a Mbps and and 5 cents for a gigabyte, then the exact point where AWS is 100x more expensive is when your line is 36% utilized.

Yes, at certain scale you likely have deals with many CDNs.

At even higher scale (YouTube, Facebook or even Netflix ) you are going to be putting content caching servers at the local ISP PoPs : it is mutually beneficial to do so .

So you can piggy back on the CDNs that do the same until you can afford to do so, with the same performance. This isn’t a privilege only given to those cloud providers, anyone with a checkbook and a pulse can do it.

The key point is video streaming products are not impaired because of high cost of bandwidth, that only YouTube can only afford because Google subsidizes it from other revenue. YouTube is profitable by itself, the combination of premium and ads is more than enough to pay for it.

It is hard to directly compete on long-form video because of audience and content depth advantage Google has with YouTube.

There are successful niche players who are fairly large (like Vimeo or Twitch or even OnlyFans) who focus on specific markets that don't require social network advantage like corporate or smaller segments etc.

For general purpose media, creators are going to focus on the platform with most audience and vice-versa, very hard to break that.

Agreed, I guess my point in my original comment is; yes, bandwidth is cheap but you aren’t going to compete at any scale hosting at OVH as was proposed. And you’ll need a lot more than cheap VMs too.

It was not that OVH is competitive for streaming , it is that even likes of OVH is orders of magnitude cheaper than cloud, let alone actual setups for streaming companies whose cost data no one in this thread has access to.

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