> We’re also going to start charging for network egress at $0.10 / GB. The financial impact on most users will be negligible, but this will let us disincentivize certain kinds of abuse (torrent aggregators sapping bandwidth, which can result in latency spikes).
Railway is far from alone in doing this, but I really find it frustrating how much most hosts overcharge for bandwidth. $100/TB of egress basically kills any P2P video chat apps (even if they rely on WebRTC and only need TURN), screen-sharing, and many other classes of interesting services one could build. It's considerably more expensive than what I paid serving audio files from a WordPress site over a decade ago, despite bandwidth being much cheaper in 2023 and media files of all sorts being larger.
i too would like to find a service where I could host ~500GB of files and cheaply send random subsets of them (~.5GB each session) to random users all over the world without it becoming >90% of the service's costs
i'm starting to think the few years of really cheap/free egress rates were actually an accounting mistake, and the true cost of moving those bits is finally becoming apparent to datacenter accountants
You should look at Hetzner [0]. They offer unmetered bandwidth on their dedicated servers with a 1Gbps uplink (I personally run a Tor relay on one averaging a sustained 15+Mbps over the past year), idem for their "Storage Share" offering, and 20TB/month at 1Gbps on their cloud VMs.
I'm not affiliated with them, just a happy customer.
Railway is far from alone in doing this, but I really find it frustrating how much most hosts overcharge for bandwidth. $100/TB of egress basically kills any P2P video chat apps (even if they rely on WebRTC and only need TURN), screen-sharing, and many other classes of interesting services one could build. It's considerably more expensive than what I paid serving audio files from a WordPress site over a decade ago, despite bandwidth being much cheaper in 2023 and media files of all sorts being larger.