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Our biggest expense isn't cpu/bandwidth, it's data. S3 (that includes snapshots/backups), databases, and memory. So your experience aligns with mine for AWS, even though we spend magnitudes more.

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We had a lot of data too, everyday we produced at least two hours of video, it would get encoded to the various formats we needed (broadcast and web), store the archive on our local server (which did a lot of backend tasks as well) and host them on Youtube/Facebook for the audience. We also had a 3rd party partner for the livestream on the site. All of that took a massive load off our web server.

If we had to have all of that on the cloud it would have been a lot more expensive.

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