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Ask HN: Does anyone use Linode but is not using all the available bandwidth?

2 points by forcer ↗ HN
We use Linode heavily as kind of CDN, storing static files that never change. Our Linode bill is about $1000p/m and most of the CPUs/disc IO is hardly used at all. The reason why we have so many instances is that each instance contributes to the total available bandwidth pool. So by having so many instances we do not pay for bandwidth overages which are very expensive ($0.1 per GB)

I believe there must be lots of companies who use Linode primarily for storing applications that are heavy on CPU/disc IO and use very little of the bandwidth.

I think there could be nice synergies in place where we could stop most of our instances and use someone's other instances for static content and essentially paying part of someone's Linode bill.

Anyone interested?

5 comments

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VincentTide
Have you compared Linode's pricing to AWS S3 which is built for your purpose (serving static files)?
VincentTide
Kinda answering my own question but S3 charges $183 for 2TB of transfer while Linode and DO charges $10. I'm actually kinda shocked at the huge price difference.
Vendan
heh, I use my linode to run a minecraft server, and, as it's often just me and a friend or 2, rarely use more then 50~100gb of the 3tb they give me. Would 1 instance worth of bandwidth be worth it?

Another thing to consider, you'd basically have to transfer the files to another person's server. How do you verify they don't mess with them? If you could reliably solve that, it'd be interesting to have some kind of "distributed CDN" thing.

forcer
its definitely trust issue but we do have system in place which would tell us if files are different.

In your case just 1 VPS instance would not help though.. we would need at least 20-30TB to make it worthwhile

ddorian43
Check arubacloud for s3 alternative and constant.com for cdn.