1TB of CDN traffic for 15 cents?

Nowadays, most people prefer to receive information not through texts, but through images and video. The increase in the volume of video content on the Internet has been observed for several years and, obviously, this trend will continue and intensify in the near future.

Many of our customers develop websites with video content of different directions. The easiest way for rapid distribution of video across the world is a major provider of CDN like Amazon or Akamai. However, despite the growing capacity of the networks providers reducing the price of traffic, CDN rates still discourage many.

For several years we offer our own solution for CDN, which is absolutely transparent for the “engine” of the site. Our clients can flexibly add and remove additional servers, combine servers in different locations, with different conditions for traffic, with different prices. Thus, our customers always have the opportunity to choose the optimal configuration at the moment. The current version of our CDN allows you to dynamically add servers to the distribution, has its own converter and HTML5 player with HLS support for managing video quality and saving traffic. Also, we provide our customers with KVS (kernel video sharing) license for free. KVS has the functions of load sharing on different servers.

When will be the answer to the question posed in the title of the post, you ask?

Creation of own CDN is a very individual matter and we always select servers and the scheme according to the wishes of the client, therefore it is impossible to speak about general prices. But still, in order for the client to determine whether it is worth creating his own Content Delivery Network (as CDN stands for), we decided to calculate the minimum price that can be obtained based on the currently available offers. Imagine that we plan to distribute content mainly to Europe. At the present time, for $85 you can order a server with 8 core/16Gb RAM/2x4TB HDD/ 1Gbps Unmetered. If the site is small, then on this server, you can host both the site and the content and converter. With the growth of the audience, at some point, 1Gbps port will become scarce. The architecture of our CDN allows you to dynamically connect and disconnect additional servers for distribution during peak hours. This is useful for servers with limited traffic (for example, 100TB) or for servers with hourly billing (for example Scaleway offers very interesting options). So, let’s say that we’ll connect 5 smart servers for $29.99 to our main server. These servers have a bandwidth of 800mbps and a dedicated 250GB SSD drive, which will allow you to cache the most “hot” content. As a result, we get 1Gbps throughput from the main server, plus 4Gbps from five additional servers. In total, you’ll get 5Gbps for $235 or 4.7 cents per Mbit. Many CDN-providers consider not the channel, but the spent traffic. For example, the same Amazon Cloudfront offers its large customers (with traffic> 5 petabytes) prices from 2 cents per GB in the US and Europe. Let’s calculate the price of 1TB of traffic in our CDN in the extreme case, if you use it at 100%. So, 5Gbps gives us about 5/8*60*60*24*30=1620000Gb per month. Given the price of $235, it appears that the price of 1Gb is 0.0145 cents. Thus, 1TB will cost 14.5 cents. Of course, these are abstract calculations and we understand that it may be far from reality in some cases. Therefore we invite all who wish to see it in real use. Contact us with a request and we will prepare a proposal that is most suitable for you.