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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Out of interest, is there any reason you don't store and serve them from Amazon S3? It's pretty easy to upload files to that using their web interface, or Panic's Transmit client if you're on OSX ( http://panic.com/transmit/ )

I seem to remember S3 also makes it easy to turn on an optional .torrent link, to save you some bandwidth charges.

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Last month's transfer (if everyone who clicked the link finished the DL) would have been more than $100 on S3. Its just a hobby. I really was hoping not to spend much if anything on it.

You can mark items in S3 as requester pays, which means you don't get hit for bandwidth.

And that no one downloads your files.

Depending on where you are, but: OVH is known to offer dedicated servers with very generous bandwidth allotments for very little money. E.g. their Dutch budget brand http://www.isgenoeg.nl offers a basic server with 5TB, then 10Mbps bandwidth for EUR 15/month, and their UK http://www.kimsufi.co.uk/ is similar.

(No personal experience, offer seems valid for nationals only, WebHostingTalk suggests there's little support, OVH apparently change their upstream providers all the time to get the best possible deals - you get a lot of bandwidth but latency varies from day to day. Seems acceptable for a simple file server.)

> Its just a hobby.

Why not set up a server at home? If I hadn't turned off my desktop this morning, I could rsync data from home.

(1) TOS for his home connection may forbid offering services. (Yes, he could pay more but ....)

(2) the hassle of running a server.

(3) he may not have much upload bandwidth, which translates to slow downloads by other people.

S3 costs money?

There's a free tier, but it's not a free service :

> 5 GB of Amazon S3 standard storage, 20,000 Get Requests, and 2,000 Put Requests*

http://aws.amazon.com/free/

Amazon doesn't break S3 out in their financial reports, but estimates are that they made half a Billion dollars in revenue in 2010, and certainly more than that in 2011.

That was a question to parent. _Of course_ S3 costs money. That's why it's not reasonable to compare it to a service like Megaupload, where you only needed to pay if you wanted to store over 200GB total, or have individual files larger than 2GB.

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