In preparing for Monday’s public FCC hearing, I decided to do a bit of research into how much money an organization can save by using bittorrent. It turns out that the savings are pretty amazing!
As you will see Democracy Now! has a fixed cost of roughly $200 per month (the service is donated) for distributing their news program at full resolution. Compare that to a bill for serving direct HTTP downloads using Amazon’s S3 service, which would currently sit at roughly $1200 per month and would increase with viewership.
Arriving at these numbers began with an email to Democracy Now!’s resident hacker, Mike Castleman. Based on the information he sent me, I calculated the following:
Current Traffic of Full-Res Video @ Democracy Now!
- Viewers/Downloaders per Day: 400-1000
- Average Video Size: 440 MB
- Total Bandwidth Transfer per Month: 7-8 Terabytes
As for the cost, they priced out a dedicated server for bittorrent delivery and found that it would be about $200 per month (someone donated the service in the mean time). I decided to compare this to Amazon’s S3 hosting and delivery service, which would be a pretty standard choice for an organization of this size.
Cost: HTTP
- Total Bandwidth Transfer per Month: 7-8 Terabytes
- Price per Gigabyte of Transfer (@ < 10 Terabytes): 18 cents
- Monthly Cost for Amazon S3: $1100 – $1500 (increasing with viewership)
Cost: Bittorrent
- Total Bandwidth Transfer per Month: irrelevant
- Monthly Cost for Bittorrent Server: $200 (doesn’t increase with viewership)
Interesting Note: Amazon S3 supports the bittorrent protocol. In the right situation, this can serve as a great solution for saving money on bandwidth.
