Comment by mrtksn
1 year ago
>it shows how disconnected this is from their real bandwidth cost
It's a value added service, they don't trade bandwidth as a commodity. Therefore unfair characterisation.
Plus, if you dive deeper: Bandwidth doesn't cost anything because bandwidth is just about pulsing some light in some glass fiber and applying some minuscule voltage on some metal fiber.Okay, maybe it costs some amount of electricity but all this is just a business model for paying on capital expenditure through time share arrangements. People can have all kind of models for this, for example you can come together with others or pay it all by yourself to install the equipment and have free bandwidth for the lifetime of the equipment.
It's all just arrangements to cover the capital investment and earn something on top of it. That's not a scam. A scam would be if they didn't account correctly for the timeshare usage or induce usage to boost payments.
> they don't trade bandwidth as a commodity
I really don't get your point. If you're a hosting provider, the very thing you're selling is bandwidth (and disk space). Everything else is a value added service.
I disagree, they are not a colocation service that happens to rent servers. They are opinionated platform for deploying web applications in a specific way. The bandwidth happens to be a necessity to do that and also a useful metric for billing by usage.