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Software company that needs fast speed on demand, large transfers
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Software company that needs fast speed on demand, large transfers

I've been working on a project this week, trying to come up with the most cost effective way to host downloads for a software company that makes some games. The games are between 3-6GB in size. On average, they sell 10-20 games a day, but when they release updates and new products, the downloads could be up to 1000 in a day easy.

My rough idea would be to get several cheap dedicated servers on 1G ports and then run Amazon Route 53 for DNS load balancing. CDN fees are just too expensive at 25 cents a gig. DigOcean only charges 0.02 per GB which would make my max cost 12 cents per download. I could use 10 of them if I had to.

I don't have enough bandwidth at my DC to handle the high loads.

Any other ideas?

Comments

  • crissic $4/TB... I think @skylarM would be more than willing to work something with you

  • PM me the specs and I'll get you a formal offer. We a lot of software distribution and can provide servers/load balancers/etc as required

  • wychwych Member
    edited October 2014

    Rage4 may be useful for a geoIP/CDN system rather than route53.

  • SplitIceSplitIce Member, Host Rep

    You could spin up a bunch of droplets at DigitalOcean. Rest assured that they have the bandwidth, and its global :)

    Load balancing wise, Route53, Rage4 or any DNS provider really. Just use Round Robin A Records, nothing special should be required.

  • StellaEVStellaEV Member
    edited October 2014

    Also, there are a few CDNs which are cheaper than 25c/GB - see below list

    • CDN77
    • CDNLion
    • KeyCDN

    Note that KeyCDN is the slowest out of the three, but offers more features (i.e. token auth, etc)

    Pricing in the above may be more expensive outside of EU/NA, you can just disable zones outside of EU/NA so that even if the person is outside of EU/NA, the CDN will serve from EU/NA servers instead of the closest super-extra-pricey server.

  • @SplitIce said:

    Load balancing wise, Route53, Rage4 or any DNS provider really. Just use Round Robin A Records, nothing special should be required.

    That would just split load over servers rather than resolve to the nearest server giving the fastest download speed(s).

  • SplitIceSplitIce Member, Host Rep

    wych said: That would just split load over servers rather than resolve to the nearest server giving the fastest download speed(s).

    I didn't say it would. The aim would be to make use of $5/1TB DigitalOcean Droplets or similar.

    Obviously GeoDNS would require Rage4 or similar.

  • tomletomle Member, LIR

    Cloudflare is free, give them a try.

  • @tomle said:
    Cloudflare is free, give them a try.

    How is this relevant?

    CF wont CDN his downloads on a free plan.

  • Mark_RMark_R Member
    edited October 2014

    develop a torrent based downloader for those games and link atleast a few official seeds to it incase there are not enough users downloading at the same time. this should provide you with alot free bandwidth if the userbase is big enough.

  • 1,000 downloads per day at 6GB each means 6TB in a day - or did I miss something? I would say that 2Gbps should be more than enough for this. If you are on a budget, then a single 1Gbps will also work if the downloads are distributed throughout the day.

    Till last year, DO had a single 1Gbps connection per physical server - not sure of that has changed now. I will recommend that you go for a single Linode 16GB which will cost $160 per month and include 16TB of traffic on a 2Gbps port. If you need more traffic, then order Linode 1GB servers which come with 2TB for $10 but don't actually deploy them. Linode allows bandwidth pooling, so you can use all the traffic from a single server.

    This is probably the simplest option. You can use multiple Linode 1G servers and round-robin if you want - you will save money and probably get better performance. You can also use Linodes in different data centers and use GeoDNS for better performance.

  • I use KeyCDN and have the downloads regularly mirrored to the CDN with rysnc. KeyCDN also supports custom SSL certificates. Since KeyCDN (as well as many CDNs) uses Anycast, you don't have to worry about GeoDNS.

    You could also setup your own CDN by getting servers around the world and using a DNS provider that supports GeoDNS (Rage4, NSOne, AWS) or a simple PHP script to redirect users to the nearest server. The problem with this though is you have to monitor the servers and make sure they're all working properly.

  • Thanks for all the suggestions. Rage looks useful for this project. Cloudfront is 12 cents a gig, way too much. D.O. is only 2 cents overage. Linode is 10 cents overage, but if you buy extra machines and just pool the storage, may be cheaper. I don't mind spending time engineering the DNS and setting up auto-failover stuff. That should be pretty easy to monitor each node and turn them off/on.

    KeyCDN isn't bad either, their price per GB is almost where it needs to be.

  • rds100rds100 Member
    edited October 2014

    You could also get a bunch of 5 EUR kimsufis and round robin between them. They come with 100Mbps unmetered.
    Could also mix them with a bunch of cheap online.net dedis. They are all in France though, but at least it's cheap.

  • tomletomle Member, LIR
    edited October 2014

    @wych said:
    CF wont CDN his downloads on a free plan.

    Ok, I didn't know that the plan only caches some file types: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200172516-Which-file-extensions-does-CloudFlare-cache-for-static-content-
    Maybe this is useful for someone else as well.

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