...I believe you have previously stated that you don't want to use AWS because you don't want to have to use a credit card to pay, nor associate your IRL identity with the service. My argument would be that this is really your only option, as using a VPS with a smaller provider (as you have been doing) is eventually going to result in your account being shut down, or your bandwidth being exhausted...
Not unless he is working with a really small provider. More and more 1GB un-metered for co-location is the standard.
* Or if it is metered it's in the multi TB range.
Bandwidth has gotten so cheap at data centers that it's pointless to rate it anymore. Case in point, Cogent just made us an offer for a 1GB fiber loop to our rack for under $400 a month all in. 3 years ago that same circuit was well over $1500. Hurricane is under $2500 for a 10GB circuit. And we are a very small buyer of bandwidth. "Real" companies that are buying multi 100GB circuits are paying very very little.
-Dave
* Most places are going for a 10 to 1 over subscription so you probably may not get the 1GB all the time but the point is the same.
It is unlikely that Loyce would be dealing with Cogent directly, but rather would be dealing with one of Cogent's customers.
Even if someone's bandwidth is "unmetered", I can assure you that usage is still "monitored". As you note, Cogent is going to oversell their capacity, and most likely, Cogent's customer who sells VPS services will also oversell their capacity. If Loyce is constantly sending hundreds of GB's worth of data to the internet, there will be less capacity for other customers to send their own data to the internet, which will degrade service for others.
The files that Loyce is hosting total over 660 GB. It would not take much for Loyce to run into hitting the multi TB range with files of that size, especially considering that it is trivial for someone to request those files multiple times.
Cogent and most providers like them as a rule do not oversubscribe, if anything they under subscribe.
They used to do it, but stopped around the GFC. No I don't think it's related, but around 2007 - 8 - 9 we just stopped seeing it, at least in the major DCs. I think there are just too many competitors. I can call Monday AM and have an agreement in a couple of days with another provider have the fiber connected a couple of days after that and be running a couple of days after that. So if I don't get my 1GB you're gone. Heck when Sandy took out people in NY loops were being turned up in hours as we all ran around the DCs getting stuff wired.
The people they sell to oversubscribe what they bought.
If you use a storage bucket on AWS or GCS, someone will need to pay $0.09/gb to transfer the file to the internet, or $0.01 to transfer your file to another data center run by the same cloud provider located on the same continent where your data is housed (or $0.00/gb -- free - within the same datacenter location). You can configure the storage bucket so that the person downloading the file will need to pay the transfer charges.
Up to $60 to download a few files. No wonder Bezos is rich
Till we got out of that business we used to joke Amazon is our best salesperson.
Their product is good, don't get me wrong, but it's super expensive and most people don't need it and a 2nd or 3rd tier provider is usually fine.
Not to mention, if your provender is not peered fast enough with Amazon they tend to be super slow since they prioritize amazon.com traffic over the aws traffic. In most major markets it's not a big deal. But in the middle of nowhere when your local ISP only has a 10GB connection to the peering network come Christmas time it can get bad.
Either way this is drifting from the main point of the thread, so I'm going to leave it alone for now.
Side note, do you know how many people are actually using this data, it's neat and all but outside of the geek-base on this forum I don't see a lot of people caring.
-Dave
