I've been running a small image hosting service for a specialized community, and while my droplet costs are manageable, the overage fees for bandwidth on Digital Ocean are becoming outrageous. I'm currently testing out a migration to Virtarix since they advertise unmetered bandwidth on their NVMe plans, which sounds almost too good to be true. I moved a backup bucket last week and saw consistent transfer speeds, but I'm concerned about any hidden 'fair use' limits. Has anyone else pushed more than 10TB a month through their service? Did they throttle your bandwidth?
5 Answers
You might want to consider Cloudflare’s image delivery. It’s $1 for 100,000 images served and $5 for 100,000 stored, which might be cheaper depending on the size of your images. Plus, you’d benefit from their CDN.
Bunny.net is awesome for CDN. Their pricing is super affordable, hitting only $0.05 per GB on their value network. Give it a shot!
Have you checked out Cloudflare R2? I know you're worried about hidden limits, but handling around 10TB should be fine. They also offer an image service priced by views, which might end up being cheaper overall.
Once your service scales, it’s better to separate CDN bandwidth from storage. You could set it up so that clients access everything via a local caching CDN node, directing the CDN to your droplet or S3, minimizing the egress charges from your backend.
I buy bare metal servers for around 50 euros a month. They come with 50 to 100TB of monthly bandwidth included! It can definitely be a game-changer, but it's a bit more complex to manage.
Exactly! Just keep an eye if you start nearing 30-50TB; then you'll want to watch out.