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Comment by devwastaken | Hacker News Reader

I've been looking at costs for having a free service like Freenode, but doing VoIP and images and such. The main problem has been affordable bandwidth with a decent number of cores (8 or so) since nginx improves dramatically with 8 or 12. But at that pricing you end up paying for a dedicated 1Gb/s or 10Gb/s unmetered, when there's not going to be that much bandwidth all the time. Or, you get dumb small limits like 10TB a month egress. Bandwidth and hardware prices today should make it possible to just be charged as you use it. Though I'm not sure if the tech behind allowing live scaling through virtualization has to be home made and therefore real expensive, defeating the savings.

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> Bandwidth and hardware prices today should make it possible to just be charged as you use it.

I'm not sure how you get one from the other.

Assuming you mean a pay-as-you-use scheme that merely charges a modest premium over the traditional model of paying up front, it's tough to see why it would be attractive for a provider. What their cost for the hardware or bandwidth happens to be wouldn't make much difference, since they have to pay it regardless.

A pay-as-you-use scheme that charges a huge premium, such as a multiple of the providers cost, on the other hand, could be quite attractive, as evidenced by what cloud providers do.

Meaning offer free VoIP?

Yes.

Why not go with bare metal from say OVH for this type of service? Running a free VoIP service on top of a cloud provider is kind of silly, not just from a cost perspective, but also having shared resources for your voice/WebRTC media servers. But then the question is, why offer free VoIP service to begin with? You're going to invite a lot of abuse and fraud attempts very quickly. Sure you can guard against that, but is it really worth it?

There's a massively booming VoIP industry right now (despite the perception of "too many players" in the market). Go out there and make money while providing good affordable service. Charge $10-$15 per line while the big guys ask for $25-$50. VoIP seats add up fast, and it's very nice MRR with not a lot of hassle if you run things right and give customers tools to get things done without calling for support for every little thing.

Or go the route that Dialpad is taking with their limited Free product (dialpad.com/free) which is kind of a bait-and-switch because surely a business will need to convert to a paid subscription of some sort if they don't end up going out of business in the first few months.

I'm talking about VoIP as in Mumble, Teamspeak, Discord, etc. And i am talking about bare metal, but dynamic hardware resources would require some sort of virtualization, but if doable without needing to be the size of Google could be a good business because you don't need to completely reserve hardware and a bandwidth line.

> i am talking about bare metal, but dynamic hardware resources would require some sort of virtualization

This is a bit confusing, as "bare metal" is usually used as a contrast to virtualization, although it I suppose it could mean "not cloud" (but further muddled by AWS offering "bare metal" instance types).

More importantly, though, if you're thinking of some kind of VPS provider, where you'd dynamically allocate and de-allocate servers from their inventory, there's no reason you couldn't run directly on the hardware with no hypervisor.

Virtualization is only strictly necessary for multi-tenancy, such as if you need to allocate only half of a server.

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