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Comment by ak217 | Hacker News Reader

I love GitHub's response, but I would urge the project more strongly to use modern CDN solutions. CDNs are dirt cheap and incredibly powerful nowadays, for the data sizes that we're talking about here.

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How would you define "dirt cheap"? One of the most popular CDN's out there (Akamai) charges $3,500/month for 10TB/month. Who's going to foot that bill? :)

10TB Amazon AWS is around $85-100, depending on how international your users are.

I believe that's off by an order of magnitude - that's actually the price per 1 TB. Also, you can turn off distribution into remote PoPs that charge more than $85/TB.

That's a list price that they charge those who don't care to negotiate.

CloudFlare starts at $0 and doesn't meter/charge for bandwidth. CloudFront charges 9 cents per GB and is integrated with other AWS APIs (which can be very useful). Both those solutions could be managed with a donation pool, I would try the CloudFlare free tier first.

CloudFlare's terms of service specifically forbid using it as a file hosting service.

Not surprising, Akamai is always at the top end of the pricing spectrum for CDN services.

That price point works out to $0.35/Gbyte. More typical list pricing for US/EU is in the $0.10-0.15/Gbyte ballpark. Prices decline rapidly as your utilization approaches 1PB per month.

I believe the problem was not the bandwith usage (which would be saved by a CDN) but the way CocoaPods is using git that generates a lot of CPU expensive operations.

Things that GitHub suggested help with that: faster check for updates, breaking up big directories so diffs are computed faster.

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