Comments on: Bandwidth costs

By: blumsday » Blog Archive » Need a year-end angle? How about the 20-cent movie download?

Tue, 12 Dec 2006 13:17:54 +0000

[...] If bandwidth costs continue along their downward spiral, it will not be long before it costs essentially nothing to distribute a movie or song. All we’ll be looking at is the fixed cost of a decent Web connection and the server and other computer assets needed to support the content online. [...]

By: Phil Steinmeyer

Phil Steinmeyer — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 02:56:59 +0000

I’d suggest finding a forum where webmasters hang out and asking there.

By: Cline

Cline — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 16:16:45 +0000

Thank you for your response! Any idea how I could get a better idea as to how many more bytes/second & total bytes?

Are there any other costs associated with streaming video that I should look into, that do not apply to text?

By: Phil Steinmeyer

Phil Steinmeyer — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 20:57:27 +0000

Well, there’s no real separation in costs for video versus text, as such, just that video uses VASTLY more bytes/second and bytes total than text.

Text sites (such as blogs), will generally run fine on a typical vendor’s ~$10/month plan. A video site, in contrast, will likely require something more heavy duty, if it receives much traffic.

I can’t really compare Yahoo/Google’s bandwidth costs to a small company’s - I know little about the former.

By: Cline

Cline — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 20:32:20 +0000

Does anyone know what bandwidth costs are for video streaming in comparison with text? Or how to think about it and where it is going in the future?

How much does it cost a Yahoo or Google in comparison with what providers charge a small company?

By: kim pallister

kim pallister — Fri, 07 Apr 2006 21:42:26 +0000

I actually have no idea what the real BW cost is, but will point out that MANY casual titles are far over that 10Mb limit these days. 20Mb is quite common these days (your point still holds, I’m just pointing it out).

By: Mischiefblog » Blog Archive » Open Kimono MMO

Mischiefblog » Blog Archive » Open Kimono MMO — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 14:48:32 +0000

[...] Bandwidth ain’t free For a company that sells client software and upgrades (bug fixes, textures, and models) one of the highest ongoing operating costs (ignoring rent, electricity, salaries, insurance…) will be hosting and bandwidth. Phil Steinmeyer recently performed a limited survey of these bandwidth and hosting costs for his company, New Crayon Games. At $0.20 per gigabyte, the size of a reasonably sized game client, $9.80 from a $10 sales is still left over for credit card processing fees, marketing, and business expenses. If instead, you choose to distribute content or clients over a P2P network like Bittorrent, bandwidth costs may be even lower. [...]

By: Donavon Keithley

Donavon Keithley — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 22:30:04 +0000

I think I’d be a little worried if I knew my host was losing money on me. (In fact I’d probably start getting paranoid every little outage or slowdown…)

I agree that for most indies the cost of bandwidth is not worth optimizing. What I like about this new Amazon thing is that — by all appearances anyway — it frees you to focus on other things. No estimating your usage up-front and no worrying about overages.

But if you’ve already got a good deal like yours with Dreamhosting, meh, why bother?