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Comment by loomer | Hacker News Reader

One of the main reasons people use Medium is that their posts will be viewed by random Medium users in addition to their own fan base, thus growing their fan base and getting more views both in the short and long term.

I'd compare it to YouTube. People could theoretically host their own videos, but the main reason people use YouTube is because it is so much easier for others to discover your videos.

Also, +1 on using Linode! Have had multiple projects on their servers. No downtime at one point for over 365 days.

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> I'd compare it to YouTube. People could theoretically host their own videos, but the main reason people use YouTube is because it is so much easier for others to discover your videos.

I appreciate the effort to create a comparison or analogy here, but hosting video is a far, far bigger problem than hosting some text. Bandwidth costs will reach into the thousands of dollars per month video that gets a few thousands views, which isn't hard to get on YouTube's platform.

You are off by four orders of magnitudes

DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode: $0.02 per GB over your transfer limit

OVH $9/month VPS: 100mbps unlimited bandwidth, and yes, OVH doesn't care if you have 7x24 100% utilisation on your 100 mbps.

Let's say you have a 100MB video that gets 20,000 views, and half of the viewers end up streaming the full video.

BW incurred: 1 TB. Cost to you: $20

Have you ever produced videos for mass consumption? I have. They don't weigh in at 100mb. Try 500mb. And the aim with sharing videos is to get as much global reach and viewership as possible -- 20,000 views? What? I want hundreds of thousands of views otherwise what's the point in putting the effort in?

If I can produce a blog post in three days that gets 100,000 hits and allows me to provide affiliate links, multiple, constantly visible adverts, and so on, all for $5/month, why would I spend five days writing scripts, filming video, doing post production, and uploading the video for potentially less impact at 10x the cost?

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