Ask HN: What would you do with almost free bandwidth? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What would you do with almost free bandwidth?

6 pointsdnsworks8 comments

S3is roughly $0.10/GB of xfer right now, which seems like a great price until you start looking at the aggresively priced dedicated server providers who range from $0.0098 to $0.049 per GB of xfer. 10tb.com, for example, arbitrages SoftLayer's bandwidth pooling options in order to include 10TB/month of transfer with each server they rent out.

So if you could deliver 10,000GB for $100/month, how would you try and make money off of it?

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I thought about creating a redneck CDN using some unmetered servers for the base load and 10TB servers for peak load. You might call it arbitraging the arbitrageurs.

Anyone know of good CDNs or at least good dedicated hosts with servers located in the Middle-East and Africa?

I need something within KSA, UAE, Jordan, Egypt and Kenya.

Also, pointers on how to evaluate CDNs and hosts; performance snooping on other people's networks is a blackbox to me, no idea how, other than ping times and traceroute.

You might ask around on webhostingtalk.com, probably the largest single forum for people in the hosting industry. I do know that Africa, India, & the Middle East are still somewhat of a no man's land in terms of hosting & dedicated servers.

They are not a no man's land, it's that the ME is a government monopoly. I lost good money setting up a SIP termination/trunking service there, and officials from a certain government told me I was competing with the government telco; it was nice while it lasted, doing corporate VOIP, but people started printing cheap phone cards using my lines and we came to the feds attention in less than 3 months.

I still wanna go back there and setup a regional presence, perhaps leasing bandwidth and storage to CDNs.

Forgive me. They're not a no-man's land, just a no-competition land .. Which is even worse.

http://www.keynote.com/products/web_performance/index.html is the big name in performance evaluation; has anyone tried them? I get the impression it's expensive.

Gomez might also be interesting to talk to. They have hundreds of browsers with their performance plugin that does remote end-user equivalent testing .. Of course having used Gomez's monitoring services, I'm unimpressed with their understanding of "Software As A Service" and their aggressive sales representatives.

I've been thinking about something like this too. What's sexy about 10TB is that they arbitrage SoftLayer who has 3 well positioned, and very well peered datacenters (Seattle, Dallas, and Virginia). If 10TB gives you the option to provision servers at each of the datacenters, then you have the beginnings of a CDN. If SL will allow you to then use their Anycast DNS service and serve different responses out of the dns servers they have in each of the three datacenters, then you have a poor man's CDN. At $0.0098/GB, you could sell bandwidth for $0.06/GB, and have a compelling introductory price for low-volume customers.

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