I'm running a small image hosting service for a niche community, and while my droplet charges are manageable, the overage fees for bandwidth on Digital Ocean are becoming unreasonable. I'm exploring a migration to Virtarix, who advertise unmetered bandwidth with their NVMe plans. So far, I've transferred a backup bucket there, and the speeds have been solid, but I'm concerned about any hidden 'fair use' limits they might impose. Has anyone managed to push more than 10TB of data per month with them? Did they impose any throttling?
5 Answers
As your service grows, it's common to separate CDN bandwidth and storage into two services. You could set up a local caching CDN that links to your backend, reducing your egress bandwidth costs significantly. A lot of websites are riding on Cloudflare for this reason, although it does come with its own risks.
Have you considered Digital Ocean's "Spaces"? It's their S3-compatible storage, which might be easier for you to switch to if you're already using their services.
You might want to consider using Cloudflare R2. Even though you're worried about potential fair use caps, pushing 10TB isn't typically a problem. They also have an images service that’s priced by views, which could turn out to be cheaper in the long run depending on your needs.
If you're still weighing your options, you should check out Bunny.net. They’ve got a CDN service that charges only $0.05 per GB, which is a pretty good deal.
I prefer buying bare metal servers myself. For about 50 euros a month, you can get 50TB or even 100TB included, but that does come with its own set of challenges.
Yeah, but keep an eye on your usage if you approach 30-50TB; that's where things might start to get tricky.