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0 pointsZarel12y ago0 comments

My site serves 25 TB/mo, and it costs me $80/mo...

$60/mo for a dedicated server, $20/mo for CloudFlare. The dedicated server only serves 1 TB of it, the other 24 TB is static assets cached and served directly by CloudFlare.

Here's a screenshot of CloudFlare Analytics for the last 30 days: http://d.pr/i/6Z8S/5GU2Ni8t

0 comments

ghshephard12y ago

Thanks - that's eye opening.

So, what this really comes down to (after a good nights sleep) - is what type of traffic/transactions are you running on your back end infrastructure.

If the data is static, then you can probably (these days) cut your costs for 25 Terabytes/month from $8K to $800 (or, in your extraordinary case, $80), simply by being a bit intelligent as to how you make use of VPS/CDN/CloudFlare Transfer allocations.

On the flip side, if much of the data you are transferring out is the result of dynamic back end transactions, queries, and generation, then it's unclear to me that you can (easily) recognize the savings that you might see when generating static content.

I'm interested in knowing if CloudFlare will start throttling/shutting down people who pay $20 and use 25 TBytes in the long term though - that alone, for some organizations, will cost them more than the extra $8K they would pay to AWS (who, have zero problem with you using 25TB, 250TB, 2.5PB, etc...)

ZarelOP12y ago

Yeah, I'll admit that other CloudFlare customers are likely subsidizing the amount of bandwidth I'm using.

Funny thing - back when I was using 10 TB/mo, my site was hosted entirely on DreamHost's $9/mo shared hosting. I moved mostly because I was starting to get several hours a month of downtime - presumably, they were gently nudging me off their service.

I've seen plenty of $60-$100 dedicated servers come with unlimited-use 100Mbit connections, which work out to 16ish TB/mo before you start getting to 50% saturation. Of course, those are still subsidized in that that pricing is possible only because most people who buy it don't max out a 100Mbit connection.

Still, though, S3's 9-12¢/GB bandwidth pricing seems a bit high. Bandwidth at DigitalOcean (presumably unsubsidized) is 2¢/GB, which comes out to a much more manageable $500 for 25 TB.

With dynamic content, CloudFlare has Railgun, which takes advantage of the fact that dynamic content is usually mostly static. Still, though, if you have 25 TB of dynamic content, I presume bandwidth stops becoming the limiting factor in your cost of operation.

hackerboos12y ago

CloudFlare cannot be making money on you as a customer. $20 for 24TB is too cheap.

ceejayoz12y ago

It's offset by the many customers paying $20 and using 1 GB, I'd imagine.

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