About
Reverse Zone, weblog on urban planning, sustainability, and technology.
Martin Laplante
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Links
A few favourite links.
- Planetizen
- Cyburbia
- LookWAYup dictionary
- RES Policy Research Inc.
- Medical Reference
- AI Topics
- Multilingual SharePoint
- Pattern Language
- Scale Down, Windsor
- Raise the Hammer
- Price Tags
- Urban Squares
- NYC Streets
- New Urban News
- Grush Hour
- Planning Politics
- Emergent Urbanism
- DNS Help
Friends' Blogs - David Wilson
- Viktor Toth
- Michael Geist
Recent posts
- Canada and US Driving No Longer Dropping
- This Year Ontario No Longer Needs Coal
- Shaping the Public Realm
- The Days of Sprawl Are Officially Over
- The Telescope is Backward
- Stop The Earth
- Amazon CloudFront New Pricing, Cheap At A Million Dollars
- Canada Spends Billions in Energy INefficiency
- Density as Persons Plus Jobs Per Unit Area
- Now is the Time for New Transit Investments
- UNFCCC Confuses Journalists on Direction of Greenhouse Gases
- Canadian Business Prefers Carbon Tax
- Streets To Home: Down With Continuum of Care!
- Close Roads to Reduce Congestion
- Science and Economics of Climate Change
- Canada and US Driving Continue To Drop
- Alberta Overtakes Ontario in Coal-Fired Generation
- Everyone Not Living In The Suburbs Is Fooling Themselves
- Canada Almost Studies the Possibility of Eventual Road Pricing
- Rogers Messing with DNS
- Will Canada Reach Kyoto Targets With New GHG Inventory Figures?
- The Delicate Balancing Act of Downtowns and the Death of Griffintown
- Internet Identity Keystone Kops
- LA Transit Plan Aims to Save 725 Metric Tons of GHG Annually by 2030
- New York City's Congestion Pricing Plan Dies Yet Again
- New York Discovers Existing Direct Democracy Zoning Rule
- Driving is Going Down in the US
- The Commuting Turnaround in Canada
- Vancouver Churches Get a Licence to Break the Law
- Carbon Capture and Storage For Canada
2008
2007
2006
2005
Complete List of Posts
Top Posts
- Close Roads to Reduce Congestion
- The Delicate Balancing Act of Downtowns and the Death of Griffintown
- Places to Grow - Pictures Tell the Story
- Why We Still Need Separation of Uses
- Dense Condos Do Not Revitalize
- Hot Air - How to Beat Climate Change By Burning More Coal
- What's Best for Renewables, Merton Rule or Feed-In Tariff?
- LEED for Neighborhood Development Pilot Rating System
- Main Arterial Woonerf
- More on Which is Greener, Houses or Apartments?
- Which is Greener, Houses or Apartments?
- Zoning Exceptions and the Failure of Planning
- 18th Century Planning is Still the State of the Art
- Ontario Municipal Board Says City Can't Plan for Mix or Density of Mixed Use
- Brownfield Brutalism - Urban Planning for Sale
- The Causes of Sprawl
- Energy Star Sprawl
- Is High Density the Cure for Transportation?
- Why not Build Medieval Towns Here?
- Vancouver has it right - Ecodensity
- Ontario has it wrong - Places to Grow
- Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander, and Barry Wellman
- Review of This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America
- New York's Downzoning Uprising
- Community Planning - are citizens powerless?
- Paris riots and urban planning
- Minimize Greenhouse Gas Emissions through Reverse Zoning
- Social Sciences: So Much Left Undone
Amazon CloudFront New Pricing, Cheap At A Million Dollars
I am a fan and a user of Amazon's Cloudfront Content Delivery Network (CDN). If you host content that is available internationally, it is a good way to put some of the static files on a set of servers that is close to the user, so that they can load it faster. It is a self-serve metered solution that calculates to the penny how much you use and charges relatively low rates, about 17-22 cents per gigabyte depending on location.
Today Amazon sent me an e-mail telling me their prices are going down. I like price decreases. As low as 5 cents per gigabyte in high volume, they say. But get to the fine print on the Amazon CloudFront site and you see that the savings are only for those who use more than more than 250 TB per month. 250 Terabytes is a lot of bytes for a single hosting account.
So how much do you have to pay them to get to that level? Have a look at your web server's latest daily log file. Is it less than one billion lines long? Then you don't qualify. 250 Terabytes divided by an average file size of 10 kb, a biggish image or a longish javascript file, is about 25 billion GETs a month or roughly a billion a day. How many hundred million uncached visitors does your web site get on an average day? To get to that 5 cents they talk about you have to use over a petabyte, 1,000 terabytes, of transfer per month. Google's total US bandwidth usage, including mail, web crawling and so forth but excluding YouTube is about 60 petabytes.
If you do the math, adding up the price of the bandwith and the extra penny per ten thousand GETs, you have to pay Amazon over $50,000 per month before you start seeing seeing any of that discount. If you spend a million dollars a year on bandwidth, you save about $2,500. I personally spend a lot less than a million dollars a year on hosting, so it was hardly worth sending me an e-mail about it.
Tags: Content Delivery CDN Amazon