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Comment by Scaevolus

3 days ago

Does this apply to caching R2 with the free tier CDN?

The R2 overview page explicitly lists "Storage for podcast episodes", but a podcast host under the free tier would serve a disproportionate percentage of audio files.

Audio is tiny compared to video (and even images), especially for podcasts, think ~1MB/minute. And they compress well if you want them to be smaller. High quality video (think 4K HDR) can quite comfortably be over 1MB per second.

I assume they don't want to become a file sharing website, but hosting a podcast is relatively easy on the bandwidth requirements.

  • A music album which gives an hour of entertainment might be distributed in lossless form at a size of 300 MB or so. A similar length TV episode could be between that and 1 GB. Podcasts are usually way lower quality and much smaller.

    A lot of people who had large image collections (like myself) online struggled with revenue relative to cost circa 2012, I saw a lot of sites I respected go down, though we did see some new style social sites such as Pinterest, Snapchat, Instagram, etc. Somehow YouTube was doing much better in terms of revenue/cost with video.

    Compressing images for the web is not at all trivial, I over-compressed a few million images and really regretted it. When I post to social now I use Photoshop's "(Legacy) Save for web" which has a nice slider for the quality level and find I can get images I take with my Sony to look like they came from a pro camera between 80kb (small flower, blurry background) to 800kb. I see huge splash images on blogs that are smaller, they make a good first impression, look close and the blocking is awful.