Comment by chatmasta
1 year ago
> they do need to make their money back somehow
You're assuming Netlify is paying for bandwidth in $/GB, when in reality they're probably paying $/gbps and thus have no costs to cover when a customer temporarily bursts their bandwidth.
It doesn't really matter how Netlify ends up paying for their traffic, at the end of the day, there's a bill to be paid.
In your example, a DDoS sucking down bandwidth would cost more than a DDoS would had it been about total transfer volume. Their servers can only produce a set amount of network traffic at a time and on one single day, this one customer sucked up 5½gbps continuously, based on the 60TB figure provided in the reddit post.
This kind of extremely bursty traffic takes capacity that would otherwise be usable for tens or hundreds of customers, but to meet their guarantees, they must scale out massively to catch these bursts. I think it makes sense that making them dip into their bandwidth reserves should cost more than the average cost of a network transfer.
I don't know the actual costs Netlify has, and I'm sure the support rep saying they can drop this down to 20% or even 5% shows that there's a buffer here, but the 5 grand OP was asked to pay seems to come awful close to what you would pay on other high-reliability providers, such as Amazon. The max fee is probably to push their expensive customers into special deals (or to their competitors), but I find their 5% offer quite reasonable.
If they actually had to pay those costs, I promise you they wouldn't be letting their customers run up a bill without a credit check.
There's also the question of whether Netlify is even accurately tracking this bandwidth...