Bandwidth is “free” as in “not”
While looking at our bandwidth usage spike after we posted the wallpaper, I was reminded of a conversation that Alex and I had about the Ultimate video we posted a few weeks ago. You saw the final version of the deployment (soapbox + download center), but there is a funny story behind how we decided to use those technologies that I can’t resist sharing.
The versions we posted, which are already much smaller than the original raw video, are still about 100 MB. Alex, since he was the one who put all the time into capturing the video’s content, was very eager to make it live. He thought the quickest way would be to use this site’s new download section. And of course he’s right. But that suggestion led to the following conversation.
Erik: There’s no way we should do that.
Alex: Why not?
Erik: We’ll run out of our bandwidth allotment.
Alex: Don’t we have infinite bandwidth?
Erik: Well, effectively. But not for free, we’ll start paying for it.
Alex: Really, when?
Erik: I don’t know. I haven’t seen our hosting contract.
Alex: How much are we talking? We have money for this sort of thing.
Erik: (Rapidly creating an uninformed guess.) Well, after some hundreds of downloads, say, we might pay a quarter per user.
[pause, while both do mental math using the site’s traffic]
Alex: That kind of money would be a different conversation.
A few mails to our hosting provider—and a quick round of more precise math—later, we sent mail to the Soapbox team. As we wrote on the front page, they hooked us up. So don’t fear for our poor server, or our community budget—go see the video if you’re interested. And be glad we did the math, because directing a Slashdot/Digg effect on ourselves would have been pretty… oh, you probably wish we hadn’t done the math. However, thousands and thousands of you have been able to download the larger version from the Microsoft download center, which would not have been possible from here!
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