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How much does Bandwidth actually cost?
dharmakaya
Member
in General
I am looking for a CDN for my live stream videos. Right now I am paying about $8/TB. I am wondering how much does it actually cost my service provider to actually buy the bandwidth?
I sometimes see VPS that offer unlimited bandwidth. Are they using a service like that or something more with colocation?
Comments
So very much money. People who sell unlimited for low prices are taking a little risk and hoping to balance it out in bulk (not everyone uses 100% at all times, in fact most don't).
I seem to recall at one point not that long ago, HE was charging something like $1 per megabit per month, and they're considered cheap.
I've seen them quote as low as $0.35/mbps back in 2015, for larger commits. I've heard through the grapevine that offers for $0.15/mbps exist as well.
We can sell high-bandwidth deals
For aggressive rates, [email protected]
Dedicated, Colo, you name it.
HE is more like $0.15/Mbps in quantity. So "bandwidth" is practically a rounding error. But delivering your content reliably over that bandwidth requires routers, switches, servers, electricity, cooling, and clueful humans. That's why $8/TB is not a crazy price to charge for $0.15 worth of "bandwidth", and why "unlimited" never means unlimited.
I'm quite wrong then
And if anyone looks for aggressive deals on bandwidth on the other side of the pond, we're here to help.
Core recently upgraded to 100GE and 100GE to Telia is now live
Times change so at one point you were likely right.
you have to calculate the cost of getting this actual bandwidth to the Customer as well, and that's, well, he.net, but yeah not as expensive as it was 10 years ago
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So from reading these responses... seems like a lot of places charge by pipeline size, instead of quantity.
They buy a 1Gbps line and then sell out portions of the traffic to guys like me that buy it per GB?
/me imagines everyone trying to justify a few Gb of UK bandwidth to their spouse "for research"
Yes, basically. Providers aggregate the demand of customers with lots of different needs and try to fill that pipe efficiently. So, your web site may push out a lot of data, but use very little bandwidth inbound. If the provider can balance you off with another customer who wants to suck down a lot of data but not send a lot out, they can fill the pipe more efficiently and each of you can get the capacity you want at a lower cost than renting the pipe yourself. (Think, for example, of an ISP that has households mostly downloading data for web browsing and watching Netflix. This leaves a lot of unused capacity that they could fill with, say, web hosting customers.) Similarly, different customers have peak demand at different times of day. Etc.
The only way to do things really. No large provider pays upstream based on data transfer
It varies between $5 to $300 per TB of bandwidth, the big players can charge any amount for corporate clients. Try bunnycdn.
I've seen $0.40/TB being thrown around for reasonable blends, ie. not just HE/Cogent. I don't know the specifics, though.
Packet.net charges $0.05/GB of Bandwidth, but also offers deals for reserved bandwidth - for example you can reserve 50-100TB at a rate of nearly $0.01-2/GB which is approximately $10-20/TB.
They offer 2*10GBps (TLB) lines for the Edge nodes which are approximately $280/month & $50/month for the T1 (8GB Ram ATOM CPU) which comes with a 2 * 1GBps line (TLB).
You can use the whole port (seen customers push 10-20GBps 24/7).
If you configure bonding you can get 20GBps.
Yes and no. It depends on the region, the options available, and the performance needed. Not all bandwidth is equal when it comes to live streams. The CDN provider needs to be able to peak at very high rate in various locations for, sometimes, prolonged periods of time and this is what brings the costs up - there just needs to be quite some capacity available everywhere for this one moment, even if it will be left unused for the rest of the month. You may be using only 1TB/month but if you happen to use it all in a few hours, 1Gbps per location just won't cut it. Then there is also all the work going behind the scenes to make the whole thing run seamlessly while fighting off a kid with a DDoS booter, and all the rest of the fun things that happen constantly with one location or another at any given moment.