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We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

blog.polyhaven.com

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Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#21

Post by walrus01 »

mike_d wrote: post #12

It is annoying that the answer is basically "we paid someone [Cloudflare] to do it." In light of that I decided to run some of my own numbers and figure it out. They are pushing about 245 Mbps out of Cloudflare (averaged over the month). Wholesale IP transit prices are anywhere from 10 cents to a dollar per Mbps depending on volume. Cloudflare dumps 40% of their traffic over peering, putting their price at $14.70/mo.…

An actually capable dedicated bare metal server with a good amount of RAM, CPU and disk, and 1Gbps will be more like $250-300/mo USD.

This would be approximately equivalent in spec to what you could build for $2500 purchase cost if buying a 1U machine and colocating itself.

For 30 bucks a month you'll get something very old and weak.

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#22

Post by [deleted] »

mrlinx wrote: post #17
tiffanyh wrote: post #16

Seems like they could pratically host everything on Cloudflare and save even more money. Asset storage: Backblaze B2 – $11 (replace with Cloudflare R2) Web hosting: Vercel – $20 (replace with Cloudflare Pages, $0 cost) Database: Firestore – $100 (replace with Cloudflare) API: Vultr – $5 Image hosting & optimization: Bunny.net – $27 (replace with Cloudflare) Domains: Cloudflare – $4 Email fees: MXroute – $3

How so? R2 is 0.015$ per GB while backblaze B2 is just $0.005.

[deleted]

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#23

Post by NorwegianDude »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #2

Uh, so how does cloudflare do it, since the answer is basically "cloudflare". They have sweet deals with the cloud providers?

Bandwidth is cheap. Cloud providers are insanely expensive for bandwidth. Cloudflare is peering in a lot of locations, making it even cheaper for them.

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#24

Post by qeternity »

This is undoubtedly better than most chuck-it-on-AWS types would achieve, but it's still quite a bit more expensive than could achieved with marginally more effort. They are already on Digital Ocean - if they used their managed database offering, they could slash their Firestore bill and get rid of their Argo bill, bringing the cost sub $200 (but - massively reduced returns on investment of effort).

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#25

Post by willcipriano »

If you are worried about getting your blog post to the top of Reddit or Hacker News (I've never been there myself); you can have a very modest web server or even a pay per request serverless sort of thing and pay $20 real quick to Cloudflare if you happen to get popular. It's the Bart Simpson method of highly scalability[0], for static content you can have global datacenter coverage in a couple minutes or so if you use them for DNS to start with. It even works if the origin server goes down.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKU3hMvD31w

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#27

Post by mike_d »

walrus01 wrote: post #21
mike_d wrote: post #12

It is annoying that the answer is basically "we paid someone [Cloudflare] to do it." In light of that I decided to run some of my own numbers and figure it out. They are pushing about 245 Mbps out of Cloudflare (averaged over the month). Wholesale IP transit prices are anywhere from 10 cents to a dollar per Mbps depending on volume. Cloudflare dumps 40% of their traffic over peering, putting their price at $14.70/mo.…

An actually capable dedicated bare metal server with a good amount of RAM, CPU and disk, and 1Gbps will be more like $250-300/mo USD. This would be approximately equivalent in spec to what you could build for $2500 purchase cost if buying a 1U machine and colocating itself. For 30 bucks a month you'll get something very old and weak.

The bulk of the traffic is serving static files. We figured out how to do this with "old and weak" hardware in the 90s.

Here is a 3.3 GHz Xeon, 24 GB of RAM, with the required disk and bandwidth for $33: https://oneprovider.com/order/item/dediconf/59

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#29

Post by jrockway »

ghostly_s wrote: post #13
jaytaylor wrote: post #8

How do 5M page views consume 80TB of traffic? That sounded like a lot, but calculates out to 1,600KB per page view. That's a lot of JS and images on every page :) A few years ago when I hosted what felt to me like a popular site, I was serving serving > 150K page views a month from a 1.5Mbps adsl uplink. With that said, back then you could gzip everything and there was no letsencrypt or CloudFlare walls across the bo…

Did you even look at the article? They operate a digital asset store.

I don't think they're a store, everything is free and Patreon supporters get early access. I do occasional 3D rendering and the HDRIs are great. The downloads are fast enough to make you ask "whoa, how is this free".

Re: We handle 80TB and 5M page views a month for under $400

#30

Post by jrockway »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #26

Question: I want to make a live video streaming website a la Twitch.tv. How much would CloudFlare charge me to stream 8 Mbps to ~80,000 viewers for 4 hours?

I think this is the sort of thing you want to ask their sales team.

I thought about doing this a while ago, after I left my job with an ISP. I would just have bought transit from them (and maybe made them regret their 10Gbps for $1000/month plan ;)

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