Nostalgia post. Secrets of Internet prices: why megabits can cost from $ 0 to $ 200 or how to get 100 Gbit / s for a penny?
I remember well the time when in 2001, a decade after the beginning of the www era, I first went on the Internet. It was that magical feeling, when an unlimited world of information opens before you, which, in comparison with the present, was very limited. And it's not even about the fact that there were no social networks, no Instagram, no Youtube, most of these social networks. networks only kill time nowadays, although some allow you to get a share of useful information than the people in them are not always busy. What can I say, there were almost no photos in normal resolution, and there was no need to speak about streaming video, the web was quite simple and the sites tried to write on bare html, making them as simple and easy as possible to speed up the load when using low-speed connections and reduce resource consumption on server side. But what a good time it was :)
At the same time, in the USA, dedicated lines were already quite widespread among home subscribers with connection speeds of up to 768 Kbps and more. Back in 1998, it was possible to acquire a corporate line at a similar speed in major US cities at a price of about $ 400 / month, and for home users options of high-speed Internet access from $ 99 per 128K channel were available, a year later it was already possible to get 384K for $ 40, prices are constantly declining. In Ukraine, as in other matters and in the Russian Federation, only the expensive and slow Dial-Up was available. Dedicated lines were something incredible and could afford a 1 Mbit / s or 2 Mbit / s channel except perhaps an Internet provider, which provided access to the network for subscribers through a modem connection for hundreds and even thousands of subscribers. The provider, having a connection of 1 Mbit / s in Ukraine or the Russian Federation, could really provide Internet access to a city with a population of 100,000+ people. The service was not yet so massive and the percentage of users was small, especially in the regions.
')
In the United States, the first Dial-Up became available to home users since 1991, when the price of access to the network was about $ 4 per hour for access at a speed of 14 Kbit / s and the peak in the number of subscribers to this service was in 1996-1998, when access costs Internet dropped to $ 20 / month for 35 hours of access at speeds up to 56 Kbps or, sometimes, even before the tariff option without taking into account the time. The situation in England was about the same. The cost of access at speeds from 14 to 56 Kbit / s (in reality, the quality of the telephone line made it possible to work at speeds of no more than 52 Kbit / s) in 1996-1998 ranged from 1 penny per minute to offers of free connection closer to 1998 from Yahoo, which provided access in exchange for browsing its resources, annoyed Internet providers offering dial-up Internet access for money. In Australia, due to the large remoteness of the region, dial-up was much more expensive and good speed appeared later, for example, access at a speed of about 14 Kbit / s cost 30 AUD per month in 1995. In regions with a large amount of oil, in such rich countries as Saudi Arabia, the number of subscribers to the beginning of the two thousandth rapidly grew and amounted to almost a million people, which accounted for more than 5% of the population and significantly exceeds the figures in Ukraine and the Russian Federation for this time.
But back to our regions - Ukraine and the Russian Federation.
So in the Russian Federation in 2001 there were only 3.8 million Internet users who went online at least once a month, which is only 2.6% of the population, and in Ukraine even fewer - 250,000 customers for about 400 providers. In 1999, in the capital, for comparison, there were only 10,000 subscribers, access to which was provided by 50 providers.
The two thousandths became a period when small Internet providers earned hundreds and thousands of dollars per hour, from a modem pool with hundreds of flashing lights, providing Internet access via a telephone line at speeds often close to 14 Kbps, and in the best cases 33 Kbps with. The modem pool physically represented a standard frame where a certain number of unpacked modems were located. The maximum connection speed of 56 Kbps was often unattainable due to the quality of the telephone line or the lack of good modems, both on the provider side and users.
Yes, downloading a 2 MB file was a complete event! It is not difficult to calculate that at a speed of 33 Kbit / s it took about 2 * 1024 * 8/33/60 = 8.27 minutes. Because at that time, the web contained low-resolution images on websites, up to a maximum of 400-500 pixels on most of the sides and 20-80 KB in size, on the very same page there was a thumbnail of up to 70-100 pixels in size, which you can click It was to view the "full-size" picture, often in a separate window, no technologies like AJAX and others were supported yet. We often had to wait for the web page to load for a few minutes and the images “crawled out” gradually, especially when there were many of them on the page. Sometimes the modem connection “hung up” and the picture crawled out underloaded, in this case you had to click on the image with the right mouse button in order to execute the “refresh” command.
Well, let's not forget about such inconveniences as a “busy” phone while using a modem or an Internet break on an incoming call, especially not lucky owners of “paired” phones, when it was necessary to share a phone line with neighbors and sometimes wait for hours while the neighbor Grandma will complete the day of calls and communication. The problem was solved only later, as soon as smart modems and digital telephone lines appeared. That in other, added other problems. Having learned to take minutes into account, telephonists decided to drastically make calls within the city to be paid, thus the price of an Internet connection has increased significantly.
I still remember my first external modem, now it’s on sale can be found for the sum of about $ 4 :) and is mainly used for sending fax messages:
Proposals seriously appear on the net in our time, although very rarely :)
Since I come from Ukraine, nevertheless, I would like to separately dwell on the history of the development of the Internet in our region. In order to establish an understanding of how much the transfer of data has generally fallen in price and what unique opportunities we have with you in our time, in comparison with the initial era. Since the section was quite voluminous, I decided to put it on Geektimes into a separate publication - 20 years of the evolution of the Internet in Ukraine, and which network do you remember 20 or 10 years ago? . In the same place, we also conduct a survey in the comments and ask you to tell how you first went to the Internet, using which access technology and what the connection speed was.
The spread of the Internet and increasing the speed of access, and hence the availability of information, leads to the rapid development of the IT sector in the field of server equipment and the construction of data centers, but before considering it, it is worthwhile to dwell separately on the development of the Web.
As we remember from history, the Internet originates in 1969, when the first attempt to transfer data - the word LOGIN, between the University of California, Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute, ended in failure - the system “hung” on the third letter. This unsuccessful start was at ARPANET - the first network for the exchange of data between academic institutions, which by 1974 covered many scientific centers:
However, the Web, as such, still did not exist. There was not even a single data transfer protocol - TCP / IP, which helped solve many problems, and the main one - the problem with data loss on the route because of the quality of the line. It appeared in the early 80s and on January 1, 1983, the ARPANET network switched to it. Although this date is considered the birth of the Internet, no Web at that time existed yet.
In 1980, Tim Berners-Lee, an employee of the European Laboratory for Nuclear Research (CERN), put forward the idea of ​​creating a unified hypertext network that would allow to tie the texts together, through cross-references. The idea looked like this on paper:
For 10 years of work, an HTML protocol was created that allowed us to exchange graphic files, as well as a URL identifier, thanks to which each web page could be assigned an address. In 1989, ARPANET ceases to exist, and in November 1991, writing the first “web server” and “web browser” with his own hands, Tim Berners-Lee publishes the first Internet site in the NeXTStep environment, which was the network catalog of scientific documentation CERN :
Only screenshots of that time have reached today, the site itself has long been inactive. But there is a site that opened in the same year and has survived to our time. ACME Laboratories - Graphics * Unix * Networks * Fun.
In 1993, the world wide web already contained 623 sites, and entertainment sites such as Doctor Fun , where David Farley had been drawing weekly comics for Internet users for more than 10 years, began to open.
In the same year, the well-known base of movies - IMDB (Internet Movie Database) , hosted by the University in Cardiff (Wales), and which later became one of the 50 most visited websites on the world Internet, originates. At first, this project was carried out on a voluntary basis and its creators were engaged in it in their free time, the base later moved to its own north in the USA and England, in 1996 it took about 9 dedicated servers. The project was offered to buy several times, but only Amazon was granted good in 1998, when, in exchange for an investment, the company received the right to sell film production through the IMDB website. Perhaps this is the most successful agreement between merchants and enthusiasts, which led only to the further development of the resource and did not cause any harm.
Also in 1993, thanks to the initiative of students from the University of California, the first music archive was opened - the Internet Underground Music Archive, the goal of which is that young musicians have the opportunity to share their own creations with a wider audience than friends and neighbors. The site itself is no longer available, but the content can be found in the Internet archive .
The first online newspaper in the world, The Tech, was opened by the Massachusetts University of Technology in May 1993.
A little later, the first website appeared with a “complex navigation structure” - Principia Cybernetica.
In March 1993, as soon as browsers learned how to display images, the world's first webcam was installed in the computer lab of the University of Cambridge, which transmitted the life of a coffee maker at 128 * 128 pixels, thanks to which everyone could find out if a coffee machine was free and not winding extra hundreds of meters through the corridors. The broadcast was completed in 2001, and the coffee machine itself was auctioned at eBay for ÂŁ 3,350. The second photo below captures the moment when the webcam was disconnected from the Internet.
The first search engines are WebCrawler and Yahoo! appear in 1994, then the first advertising banners appear. The current Wired portal has posted an AT & T banner ad:
In RuNet, the first site appears in 1994, it was available at www.ru , but today only its reproductions have survived.
But the Moshkov library , one of the first sites of the RuNet, has not changed its appearance so far. According to the author, he has no artistic taste, and due to the lack of design, the resource is light and looks the same on all devices.
By 1996, the Russian Internet already has 30-50 sites already, the first search engines appear - Rambler, and about a year later Yandex, which bypassed a competitor at the expense of better morphological analysis, as well as viral advertising on TV, already in the early 2000s:
It is noteworthy that at the beginning the search engines did not completely perceive the Cyrillic alphabet. And across the Internet, about 100,000 documents were indexed. Very interesting is the EvolutionWeb project , which displays how web technologies have evolved over time. This development took place both due to the increased connection speed and due to the increased power of computers, servers and the development of mobile devices for accessing the Internet.
It is noteworthy that if in the initial era, the Internet was used by users mainly for file sharing and the web as such did not exist, then with the arrival of cheap ADSL in 2004 in the Russian Federation, file sharing gained explosive popularity. In Russia, the first torrent tracker torrents.ru was created:
By 2008, the total speed of distribution exceeded the value of 172 Gbit / s, which amounted to 1/4 of the total traffic of the Moscow traffic exchange point MSK-IX. About 3 thousand requests from customers per second - 10 million per hour, 240 million per day. 40,000 packages per second on the network interface. 15,000 interrupts per second. 1200 processes around the top. Download on 8 nuclear machine - 10-12 at peak hours. And still, some of the requests dropped. Did not have time to service. Unfortunately, it was not possible to find the current value of peer-to-peer traffic, who knows - share in the comments for comparison.
In Ukraine, in August 2005, a regional tracker appeared - torrents.net.ua, the need to create a resource was due to the fact that the majority of users in Ukraine do not have high-speed and unlimited access to world traffic.
Until September 2008, the tracker was closed for users not from the UA-IX zone, therefore the number of users grew at a slow pace.
And what about the placement of sites? At the beginning, hosting providers, as such, did not exist. The websites were hosted on the servers of universities and organizations that have a permanent connection to the Internet. Tracking what happened in the period 1991-1995 is now quite problematic. In 1995, Angelfire offered free as much as 35KB of space for user pages, and GeoCities - a whole 1MB. For more information about the first steps of hosting, read the essay in the article “First steps of hosting” , which was published in our blog earlier and is today, perhaps, one of the most complete.
Interestingly, hosting in the USA, in 2000, was quite expensive :
$ 200 / month for 200 MB of quota on the server and 3000 MB of outgoing traffic (500 MB for the minimum tariff plan), and traffic over the limit was paid from $ 55 to $ 27 per GB). It was possible to connect a “dedicated line” for your site, the tariffs were as follows: 128K - $ 395 / month, 384K - $ 799 / month, 1M - $ 1200 / month. Connecting the “channel” and activating the hosting also provided for an installation fee of about one monthly fee. At the end of 2000, the same provider offered unlimited disk space with payment only for traffic and reduced the cost of traffic to $ 40 per 20 GB. And in 2002, he reduced tariffs to $ 20, made traffic "unlimited" and re-introduced quota restrictions.
Also interesting are the rental prices for the first dedicated servers in 2000:
A server with 8 GB HDD looks like a real “fossil” in today's time. But what to say, I personally used up to 2004 PCs with HDD, where the effective quota was about 7 GB. And of course, the fee of $ 5000 + / month for 6 Mbit / s to the server looks terrible now. Later, the price was reduced to $ 300 / Mbit, but still it was not enough.
It goes without saying that the decline in prices for connectivity and the cost of access to the Internet was due to an increase in the number of subscribers and the construction of new communication channels, including underwater optical highways. When you encounter all the complexity of laying cables across the ocean floor and learn the approximate cost of the project, it becomes clear why 1 Mbit / s across the Atlantic could cost $ 300 / month and even more. In more detail with the history of the development of the main underwater Internet networks you can find in our article:
Messages in depth: the amazing story of the underwater Internet
In Ukraine and the Russian Federation, the process of hosting their own sites began, perhaps, with free hosting narod.ru from Yandex , in 2000:
There was also a similar project from mail.ru - boom.ru, but this free hosting did not receive such distribution as the People. Subsequently, the free hosting of “Yandex” was absorbed by the most successful free website builder and hosting of 2008-2010 - “uCoz” and the opportunity to build a website using the tools “uCoz” is now available for the domain narod.ru. "Yandex" refused to "People" because of the development of social networks and reduced interest in the service to build their own sites.
Until 2002, it was beneficial for Ukraine to host its own servers, except for home network providers, although most kept their servers in offices and even at home due to very expensive traffic for collocation services, although this violated the terms of service for home subscribers. Many who simply preferred to use ordinary stationary computers for this purpose and not spend money on server hardware. Such aksakals are found in our days. But if then it was possible to understand why I wanted to make myself a “hosting” at home, but now it is difficult to understand. And it's not about people who like to do tests and need a server at home for this.
The situation abroad was better, because there the Internet became accessible to the public earlier and the development process was started earlier. «» , , , , , IT-c.
1997 , , -, - . - - 1998 , , :
2003 :
, 4 2000 512 / . , «» , (IP-). , LeaseWeb , -, , - , .
, DSL 2003-2005 LeaseWeb KPN ( 27,5 400 / DSL 82,5 4 / , 160-700 / ):
LeaseWeb World Access , IP-, LeaseWeb. 2005 , — 256K, 512K, 1M, 2M 8 50 .
LeaseWeb - Macromedia Flash Communication Server MX:
99 64 / 599 / . - 9 / 5 - 1 145 250 25 .
, . :
Dell Power Edge 750/C 2.4 GHz / 4GB RAM / 40GB HDD 67 + 12.5 ( 1 ) + + ( 50 500 200 2000 , 20-2 , ).
( ) , -. 2006 , 10 / , 249 :
, , — :)
— «», , - . «» , . , , . , , , -, .
- «», 2006 :
, . , , , . , , , 2 30% , , .
, - , , , . , - . % 5% .
, - «» , , . - «» , .
? The answer is very simple. , . , , , . «colo» , , , , , , , , , .
«colo» - .
- . , :
, - , MSK-IX, SPB-IX ( ), , 9 10 ( ) . % , . , 2017 , , , ! 40 , 986 , 40 / 80 / .
, 2017 , , 10 :
About the VOLS project itself You can watch a detailed video here: part 1 , part 2 , part 3 , part 4 . The only thing to note is that the journalists made inaccuracies, according to their words, the same satellite channel was only 1 Gbit / s per city, although in fact the total traffic before the introduction of the FOCL was about 2.5 Gbit / s. Well, you need to understand that the problem was not only speed, but also how much in high ping, which was obtained by using satellite Internet, which came back again at the time of the accident on the VOLS .
At the end of 2006, the first sites with movies online, file sharing and other similar resources appear in the Russian Federation, and in order to reduce the cost of foreign traffic, as Ukrainian traffic can be impressive and not fit into the ratios prescribed by the same Agave, some of the servers are large projects try to place in data centers with connection to UA-IX or create additional Russian traffic artificially, using torrent'y, which were distributed exclusively to Russian users, and in some cases file sharing services that were available exclusively for Russian IP addresses. As a result, if Ukraine wanted to download fully and at a good speed, many of the users bought a Russian VPN, since the speed for the same ifolder.ru was always higher from the Russian Federation:
File sharing, despite the popularity of torrent, is gaining explosive popularity, since the download speed is often much higher than when using torrent, and there is no need to distribute and maintain rating (when you give more than you download, or at least no more than 3 times less). The asymmetric DSL channel, when the speed at the return was significantly lower than the speed at the reception (10 times or more), is to blame for this, and you should not forget that not every user wanted to “sit” and store many files on his computer.
That is why the same rapidshare.com, which dates back to 2004 , when a similar project was opened in the rapidshare.de domain, turned out to be so popular that already in 2005 the storage capacity exceeded 1000 TB, and the total volume of the planned generated traffic became 80 Gbit / s:
Of course, such connectivity needed to be paid for somehow, the monetization scheme was mainly due to premium accounts, which allowed downloading several files and high speed from 100 to 300 seconds without a captcha. The cost of a premium account started from 4.5 euros for 2 days of access and reached up to 79 euros per year:
Subsequently, the premium account allowed you to upload files of several hundred megabytes in size, which was convenient, since the same film did not have to be divided into 10-30 parts depending on the volume, the number of archives was less. At that time, WinRAR became a popular archiver, which allowed adding parity to the files (recovery information up to 5% of the actual file size), which avoided the archive's bit rate and restored the file from a number of archives to full.
It is also worth noting that many providers at that time had connections to different backbone providers and therefore the download speed could very much depend on what backbone networks went through the traffic. Therefore, on the same rapidshare, there was a choice between Cogent, Telia and Level (3). The situation with speed improved after the growth in the number of providers connected to the German traffic exchange point DE-CIX, to which, by the way, even providers from Ukraine, such as Wnet, were directly connected.
Therefore, already in 2006, wnet.ua proposed an almost similar Agave tariff, European collocation :
So, “Wnet” paid the subscriber Ukrainian traffic at the rate of $ 1 per GB, while foreign traffic cost the subscriber $ 10 per GB, provided that the ratio of outgoing traffic to incoming traffic was 4/1. Certainly - it was still a significant fee, because traffic turned out to be free only if there was 10 times more Ukrainian traffic. Thus, in order to generate 9 Mbit / s abroad for free, it was necessary to generate 90 Mbit / s to Ukraine. That was completely different from the proposal of Agave, where it was enough that foreign traffic did not exceed Russian.
Therefore, the earlier considered offer from the Volia data center was much more profitable than the offer from Wnet, which also, on October 1, 2006, decided to exit from the UA-IX Ukrainian traffic exchange point, since UA-IX refused to sell more ports that were needed by Wnet, possibly as a result of a peer-to-peer war, namely lobbying the interests of other providers that Wnet began to compete with, and maybe because of the lack of those. the possibility of providing additional ports, or perhaps because Wnet violated the agreement and built peering inclusions with other participants of the exchange point (the feature of the exchange rules
From April 14, 2007 , Volya introduces a tariff with unlimited outgoing traffic abroad for the most expensive tariff plan for UAH 1399 / month ($ 280) :
Due to this, in 2008, Volia already had 20 Gbit / s connection to UA-IX and 4 Gbit / s to the world from several trunk operators. Further development of the hosting services market can be traced already in our history:
"Ua-hosting.company" or how to become a hosting provider from scratch and generate traffic more than the whole of Belarus
Since we started to provide hosting services from 2006 among the users of our resource, and since July 2009 we have allocated services to a separate project - ua-hosting.com.ua, which in the future went international and completely moved abroad and is now known Under the ua-hosting.company brand and is available through the short domain http://ua.hosting .
It is worth noting that over the past 10 years, the market has undergone tremendous changes, and the reason for this is not only a significant reduction in the cost of main channels, but also a redistribution of the audience among a multitude of projects, due to the closure of once popular projects. Successful resources such as file sharing, which occupied the top places in terms of attendance in the Alexa ranking, fell into oblivion, for many reasons, but mostly because of the ongoing war with the rightholders.
So in Ukraine, once famous ex.ua, which generates over 15% of all traffic of the Ukrainian exchange point UA-IX (in fact, traffic exchange points in Kiev, since regional operators were rarely represented, especially with the advent of the exchange point Giganet and DTEL-IX) was closed after closing no less famous fs.to, who bought at one time 100 Gbit / s in the Netherlands from us. And the deal with the once famous megauload was even more resonant when over 600 servers of this file sharing service were withdrawn from the data center in the Netherlands where we are located. Rutracker was blocked on the territory of the Russian Federation by Roskomnadzor, and torrents.net.ua in Ukraine ceased to exist due to fear of reprisals.
The audience went to Youtube, Instagram and other social. network. Sites for an adult audience, perhaps, have not lost popularity, only now the earnings on teaser ads for our webmasters from the Russian Federation and Ukraine have lost all meaning due to the prices for advertising and paying for foreign channels, the price of which, by the way, has decreased several times in comparison, even with 2012, when it seemed that it could not be cheaper already, it became quite problematic.
As we could understand, having familiarized yourself with the information presented above, the price of Internet traffic depends on where the traffic is to be delivered to, how popular this direction is, how fast it is to transfer data to the stream and with what delay. As well as the price will depend on what channels of communication the traffic will go through, which determines how direct the route is and what priority the traffic will be in one way or another, which in turn determines the final latency (ping) value from one point to another.
For example, 10 Gbit / s from Novy Urengoy to Norilsk will obviously cost not $ 2,000 / month or even $ 6,000 / month, since more than $ 40 million was invested in the construction of the fiber-optic cable line, the monthly cost of the channel in 40 Gbit / s is 40/15/12 = $ 0.22 million or $ 55,000 / month for 10 Gbit / s and this is not a channel on the Internet, but only the cost of delivering traffic via high-quality fiber-optic communication lines between two remote locations. And this money needs to be taken now from the population of Norilsk, which will watch the same Youtube (the traffic to which will cost even more, since it will be necessary to pay the highways for delivery up to the Youtube networks), which means the traffic from it will be quite expensive and the activity of the population there will be held back by this price. There is an option when Youtube may want to be closer to its users and wants to pay part of the cost of the channel to them instead of them, in this case, the cost of access to the Youtube resource for the population of Norilsk may become lower. This example clearly demonstrates what the price of access to specific Internet resources can consist of. Someone always pays for your traffic, and if it’s not you, then either the advertisers and resources that generate this traffic, or the backbone provider or just an Internet provider who benefits from this traffic (for example, to get discounts on other referrals or any tax breaks that may be beneficial in the case of Norilsk or simply because a fairly wide channel has been bought to get a discount on the delivery of traffic and it stands idle).
The main level I operators, such as Cogent, Telia, Level 3, Tata and others, differ in that they charge for the delivery of traffic from everyone who is connected to them, because traffic generators are trying to exchange traffic with providers where their audience is located directly. Thus, there are situations when the so-called peering wars are generated, including between the first-level trunk operators and large generators, when priority is given to specific consumers, while for others the price of cooperation can be artificially inflated, in order to crush a competitor, or just for the purpose of enrichment, since the traffic generator simply does not have other options. Therefore, disputes often arose, including litigation, as some companies did not maintain net neutrality and tried to do it in a very veiled way.
So, the dispute between Cogent and Google regarding IPv6 traffic has not yet been resolved, which is why it is simply impossible to peer between companies for a direct exchange . Cogent requires money from Google for traffic on their network, but Google wants to get free, because the mass of Cogent subscribers (data centers, home Internet providers) are active consumers of traffic from Google networks, by the way, IPv4, and not IPv6, which would reduce the delay and reduce the cost of traffic for these subscribers, subject to the growth of% IPv6 traffic. But Cogent is apparently unprofitable, as it is a backbone provider of Level I, and external traffic from its networks is paid for by backbone providers of the second (they are paid by backbone providers of I level and get profit from the third level providers) and even of the third level (they are paid to second level providers and get money from end customers).
In order to understand what constitutes the final price of traffic for a resource, consider the situation on the example of the popular service Cloudflare, the essence of which is to make websites “closer” to its audience, to help reduce the load on the infrastructure, caching static information and filter possible DDOS attacks.
Of course, that Cloudflare hosts servers in all regions where there is a demand for traffic, that is, almost all over the world. And in order to save on traffic, he tries to enter into peer-to-peer agreements with regional providers who are able to deliver traffic from Cloudflare to users for free, bypassing the expensive Tier I backbone operators who charge for traffic in any case. Why is it profitable for local providers? With significant volumes of traffic, they also need to pay, like Cloudflare, Tier I level operators significant funds for traffic delivery, where it is more profitable to connect their channel “directly” (invest once in construction) and receive traffic for free, rather than pay monthly big money to the trunk operator. Even in cases where direct peering is not possible, it is more profitable to connect through networks of other transit providers, where the cost of traffic will be much lower than the cost of traffic when transmitting via Tier I. Yes, the route becomes not very direct, the ping may increase slightly, the transmission rate may slightly decrease on stream, but quality can still be acceptable for making such savings.
But it is not always possible to enter into peer-to-peer agreements, yet in some regions Cloudflare is forced to buy a fairly large% of connectivity from backbone providers, and the price of traffic varies greatly, depending on the region. Unlike some cloud services, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or traditional CDNs, which often pay for traffic almost by the way, Cloudflare pays for maximum use of the channel for a certain period of time (the so-called "traffic flow"), based on the maximum number of megabits per second, which are used during the month at any of the main providers. This accounting method is called burstable, and a special case is the 95th percentile. 95 percentile is a method used to provide flexibility and batch use of channel width. This allows the consumer to exceed the bandwidth established by the tariff by 5% of the total time of using the channel, without increasing the cost. For example, if your tariff involves the use of a bandwidth of 5 Mbit / s, then the maximum bandwidth limit of the channel can be exceeded by 36 hours each month (5% of 30 days). The bandwidth used is measured and recorded every 5 minutes during the month as an average value over this small five-minute period of time. Measurement of the used bandwidth in each time interval occurs by dividing the amount of transmitted data over the interval by 300 seconds (the duration of the specified interval). At the end of the month, 5% of maximum values ​​are removed, and then the maximum number is selected from the remaining 95%, and it is this value that is used to calculate the payment for the channel width.
Legend has it that in the early days of its existence, Google used contracts with 95 percentiles in order to carry out indexing with a very high bandwidth during one 24-hour period, and during the rest of the time the intensity of traffic consumption was significantly lower, thereby providing significant savings on payment consumed channels. Clever, but certainly not a very durable strategy, since later they still had to build their own data centers and even channels to index resources more often and pay less for intercontinental traffic.
Another "subtlety" is that you usually pay backbone providers for the prevailing traffic (inbound or outbound), which in the case of CloudFlare allows you to completely unpaid inbound traffic. After all, CloudFlare is a caching proxy service, in consequence of which the outcome (out) usually exceeds the input (in) by about 4-5 times. Therefore, bandwidth pricing occurs solely on the values ​​of outgoing traffic, which allows not to pay for the entrance completely. For the same reason, the service does not charge an additional fee when the site is hit by a DDOS attack. The attack certainly increases the consumption of incoming traffic, but if the attack is not very large, the incoming traffic will still not exceed outgoing and, therefore, it will not increase the cost of the channels used.
Most peer-to-peer traffic is usually free, which cannot be said about traffic from the Netflix service, which after long debates had to pay Verizon and Comcast for peer-to-peer connections in order to ensure acceptable video streaming speed for users of these operators.
In the diagram above, we can see how the number of free peering inclusions of Cloudflare is increasing over the course of 3 months, both with IPv4 and with the IPv6 version of the Internet protocol. And below, also within 3 months, we can observe the global growth of Cloudflare peering traffic, which currently uses more than 3000 peering inclusions and saves about 45% of funds to pay for expensive transit traffic.
Cloudflare does not disclose how much it pays for transit backbone traffic, but gives comparative values ​​from different regions from which it is possible to make a rough conclusion about the amount of costs.
Consider early North America. Let's assume that as a benchmark in North America, we take a mixed average for all transit providers of $ 10 per Mbit / s per month. , , . , 1 / 10 000 ( , , , , , , ).
($10 / ) ($ 0 / ). , , , . , , . . Cloudflare , - .
, , Cloudflare 45% , - 20-25%, 1 / $7,5-8 / . . ?
, , , , % , , — , % Cloudflare 45-50%.
$4,5-5 / . % — AMS-IX , DE-CIX LINX . , , , , Equinix -, , . 2014 1200 , 400.
, , Cloudflare 50-55%. 6-7 $70 / . $28-32 / , 6-7 , .
. , , -. - - . , , — , , . , - , , , «» .
, Cloudflare 3 % 0 60%.
, , . 17 , $68 / , , , , . , - «carrier neutral», . , Cloudflare - -, , 60% .
Cloudflare , , , . % 50%, Telstra — - , $200 / , 20 . 2015 $100 / . , Cloudflare , 33 (22 750 ).
, , — $140 / Cloudflare 90% , $14 / . - , , , , 100 -. Middle East 100%, CloudFlare , -.
2 , 2016, — , 15% , $85 / . , Cloudflare, :
, , 6 — HiNet, Korea Telecom, Optus, Telecom Argentina, Telefonica, Telstra, Cloudflare , , . Cloudflare 6 6% , 50% , , 6 . , Cloudflare «» - ( -), , , , , Telstra , , , , Cloudflare, .
Telegeography — , , , , . , , .
Dedicated Internet Access (DIA) , - . , $6 $8 / .
, , 2 Intel Dodeca-Core Xeon E5-2650 v4 128GB DDR4 6 x 480GB SSD 1Gbps 100 $249 / , 300+ / , 1 / $6 / , ?
-, , EvoSwitch , , , , . 2017 .
, 5,5 / , 36 , 2000 , 25 . , , , , , , - . , — , , , -. - «» - , , , -.
. , - , , oversell'a, , , - , . , , .
Consider an example. 10 100 / , 100% . , 300 / 1 / , — 2 / ( ) . — 700 / , , 100 / 10 , , 100 / «» , - , . , , 500 , , — 166 / , 300 /. 334 / , , .
, 100 / , . . 1000 100 / 10-15 / , , 10-15% . 100 / - , , , . , , , . %, , 50 5% . , , « », , , 100 / , — . , , , .
-, . , 100% , , 100%, 10-20% ( , ). , - , .
, , % 10-15% 50% , -, 100 / , , . , 1 / 10 / , , 1 / 100 / , 1 / , , , . , , , , . 1Gbps 100 10%, , , 10 .
- , - , , «» . , . - , , , «» .
oversell'a , , 10 Gbps Unmetered , , , . . 50 10 Gbps Unmetered , 250 / , , 900+ 100 / 1 / . 10 / $3000 / , — 2 ( $1800 ). , .
C , I Cogent, — $1199 10 / $4999 40 Gbit / s Unmetered.
https://ua-hosting.company/serversnl — , — . .
2 Xeon E5-2650 / 128GB / 8x512GB SSD / 10Gbps — $1199
2 Xeon E5-2650 / 256GB / 24x512GB SSD / 10Gbps — $2099
2 Xeon E5-2650 / 256GB / 24x1TB SSD / 10Gbps — $3599
2 Xeon E5-2650 / 256GB / 24x2TB SSD / 10Gbps — $6599
2 Xeon E5-2650 / 256GB / 8x1TB SSD / 20Gbps — $1999
2 Xeon E5-2650 / 256GB / 24x512GB SSD / 20Gbps — $2999
2 Xeon E5-2650 / 256GB / 24x1TB SSD / 20Gbps — $4599
2 Xeon E5-2650 / 256GB / 24x2TB SSD / 20Gbps — $7599
2 Xeon E5-2650 / 256GB / 24x512GB SSD / 40Gbps — $4999
2 Xeon E5-2650 / 256GB / 24x1TB SSD / 40Gbps — $5599
2 Xeon E5-2650 / 256GB / 24x2TB SSD / 40Gbps — $8599
100Gbps Unmetered , , .
, Cogent , , . RAID-, 6 / , « » . , , . Cogent . , , . , Cogent, , . , , , .
, , 10, 40 100 / , - , . - - , $55 000 10 / , — , . , — . , 10 / , Ultra HD 1000-4000 «» .
. 10 / , $400 / «» .
, Wi-Fi, « » ( 300 / ), , , . Why do you need it? . James Busch, , .
« 200 , PET 3D 10 . . , 7 10 / . , , , , 20-30 , , 10 , .»
, — 10, 20, 40 100 , . , 1 10 / .
. , - , . , , 2005 . . , . , . - , . , — . , . - -, , - 0 , ! . , !
BLACK FRIDAY : 30% - BLACK30% 1-6 !
These are not just virtual servers! This is a VPS (KVM) with dedicated drives, which can be no worse than dedicated servers, and in most cases - better! We made VPS (KVM) with dedicated drives in the Netherlands and the USA (configurations from VPS (KVM) - E5-2650v4 (6 Cores) / 10GB DDR4 / 240GB SSD or 4TB HDD / 1Gbps 10TB available at a uniquely low price - from $ 29 / month , options are available with RAID1 and RAID10) , do not miss the chance to place an order for a new type of virtual server, where all resources belong to you, as on a dedicated one, and the price is much lower, with a much more productive hardware!
How to build the infrastructure of the building. class c using servers Dell R730xd E5-2650 v4 worth 9000 euros for a penny? Dell R730xd 2 times cheaper? Only we have 2 x Intel Dodeca-Core Xeon E5-2650v4 128GB DDR4 6x480GB SSD 1Gbps 100 TV from $ 249 in the Netherlands and the USA!
PS , Geektimes — 20 , 20 10 ? , . , -, . . , / ?
At the same time, in the USA, dedicated lines were already quite widespread among home subscribers with connection speeds of up to 768 Kbps and more. Back in 1998, it was possible to acquire a corporate line at a similar speed in major US cities at a price of about $ 400 / month, and for home users options of high-speed Internet access from $ 99 per 128K channel were available, a year later it was already possible to get 384K for $ 40, prices are constantly declining. In Ukraine, as in other matters and in the Russian Federation, only the expensive and slow Dial-Up was available. Dedicated lines were something incredible and could afford a 1 Mbit / s or 2 Mbit / s channel except perhaps an Internet provider, which provided access to the network for subscribers through a modem connection for hundreds and even thousands of subscribers. The provider, having a connection of 1 Mbit / s in Ukraine or the Russian Federation, could really provide Internet access to a city with a population of 100,000+ people. The service was not yet so massive and the percentage of users was small, especially in the regions.
')
In the United States, the first Dial-Up became available to home users since 1991, when the price of access to the network was about $ 4 per hour for access at a speed of 14 Kbit / s and the peak in the number of subscribers to this service was in 1996-1998, when access costs Internet dropped to $ 20 / month for 35 hours of access at speeds up to 56 Kbps or, sometimes, even before the tariff option without taking into account the time. The situation in England was about the same. The cost of access at speeds from 14 to 56 Kbit / s (in reality, the quality of the telephone line made it possible to work at speeds of no more than 52 Kbit / s) in 1996-1998 ranged from 1 penny per minute to offers of free connection closer to 1998 from Yahoo, which provided access in exchange for browsing its resources, annoyed Internet providers offering dial-up Internet access for money. In Australia, due to the large remoteness of the region, dial-up was much more expensive and good speed appeared later, for example, access at a speed of about 14 Kbit / s cost 30 AUD per month in 1995. In regions with a large amount of oil, in such rich countries as Saudi Arabia, the number of subscribers to the beginning of the two thousandth rapidly grew and amounted to almost a million people, which accounted for more than 5% of the population and significantly exceeds the figures in Ukraine and the Russian Federation for this time.
But back to our regions - Ukraine and the Russian Federation.
So in the Russian Federation in 2001 there were only 3.8 million Internet users who went online at least once a month, which is only 2.6% of the population, and in Ukraine even fewer - 250,000 customers for about 400 providers. In 1999, in the capital, for comparison, there were only 10,000 subscribers, access to which was provided by 50 providers.
The two thousandths became a period when small Internet providers earned hundreds and thousands of dollars per hour, from a modem pool with hundreds of flashing lights, providing Internet access via a telephone line at speeds often close to 14 Kbps, and in the best cases 33 Kbps with. The modem pool physically represented a standard frame where a certain number of unpacked modems were located. The maximum connection speed of 56 Kbps was often unattainable due to the quality of the telephone line or the lack of good modems, both on the provider side and users.
Yes, downloading a 2 MB file was a complete event! It is not difficult to calculate that at a speed of 33 Kbit / s it took about 2 * 1024 * 8/33/60 = 8.27 minutes. Because at that time, the web contained low-resolution images on websites, up to a maximum of 400-500 pixels on most of the sides and 20-80 KB in size, on the very same page there was a thumbnail of up to 70-100 pixels in size, which you can click It was to view the "full-size" picture, often in a separate window, no technologies like AJAX and others were supported yet. We often had to wait for the web page to load for a few minutes and the images “crawled out” gradually, especially when there were many of them on the page. Sometimes the modem connection “hung up” and the picture crawled out underloaded, in this case you had to click on the image with the right mouse button in order to execute the “refresh” command.
Well, let's not forget about such inconveniences as a “busy” phone while using a modem or an Internet break on an incoming call, especially not lucky owners of “paired” phones, when it was necessary to share a phone line with neighbors and sometimes wait for hours while the neighbor Grandma will complete the day of calls and communication. The problem was solved only later, as soon as smart modems and digital telephone lines appeared. That in other, added other problems. Having learned to take minutes into account, telephonists decided to drastically make calls within the city to be paid, thus the price of an Internet connection has increased significantly.
I still remember my first external modem, now it’s on sale can be found for the sum of about $ 4 :) and is mainly used for sending fax messages:
Proposals seriously appear on the net in our time, although very rarely :)
The history of the development of the Internet in Ukraine
Since I come from Ukraine, nevertheless, I would like to separately dwell on the history of the development of the Internet in our region. In order to establish an understanding of how much the transfer of data has generally fallen in price and what unique opportunities we have with you in our time, in comparison with the initial era. Since the section was quite voluminous, I decided to put it on Geektimes into a separate publication - 20 years of the evolution of the Internet in Ukraine, and which network do you remember 20 or 10 years ago? . In the same place, we also conduct a survey in the comments and ask you to tell how you first went to the Internet, using which access technology and what the connection speed was.
The spread of the Internet and increasing the speed of access, and hence the availability of information, leads to the rapid development of the IT sector in the field of server equipment and the construction of data centers, but before considering it, it is worthwhile to dwell separately on the development of the Web.
Web development
As we remember from history, the Internet originates in 1969, when the first attempt to transfer data - the word LOGIN, between the University of California, Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute, ended in failure - the system “hung” on the third letter. This unsuccessful start was at ARPANET - the first network for the exchange of data between academic institutions, which by 1974 covered many scientific centers:
However, the Web, as such, still did not exist. There was not even a single data transfer protocol - TCP / IP, which helped solve many problems, and the main one - the problem with data loss on the route because of the quality of the line. It appeared in the early 80s and on January 1, 1983, the ARPANET network switched to it. Although this date is considered the birth of the Internet, no Web at that time existed yet.
In 1980, Tim Berners-Lee, an employee of the European Laboratory for Nuclear Research (CERN), put forward the idea of ​​creating a unified hypertext network that would allow to tie the texts together, through cross-references. The idea looked like this on paper:
For 10 years of work, an HTML protocol was created that allowed us to exchange graphic files, as well as a URL identifier, thanks to which each web page could be assigned an address. In 1989, ARPANET ceases to exist, and in November 1991, writing the first “web server” and “web browser” with his own hands, Tim Berners-Lee publishes the first Internet site in the NeXTStep environment, which was the network catalog of scientific documentation CERN :
Only screenshots of that time have reached today, the site itself has long been inactive. But there is a site that opened in the same year and has survived to our time. ACME Laboratories - Graphics * Unix * Networks * Fun.
In 1993, the world wide web already contained 623 sites, and entertainment sites such as Doctor Fun , where David Farley had been drawing weekly comics for Internet users for more than 10 years, began to open.
In the same year, the well-known base of movies - IMDB (Internet Movie Database) , hosted by the University in Cardiff (Wales), and which later became one of the 50 most visited websites on the world Internet, originates. At first, this project was carried out on a voluntary basis and its creators were engaged in it in their free time, the base later moved to its own north in the USA and England, in 1996 it took about 9 dedicated servers. The project was offered to buy several times, but only Amazon was granted good in 1998, when, in exchange for an investment, the company received the right to sell film production through the IMDB website. Perhaps this is the most successful agreement between merchants and enthusiasts, which led only to the further development of the resource and did not cause any harm.
Also in 1993, thanks to the initiative of students from the University of California, the first music archive was opened - the Internet Underground Music Archive, the goal of which is that young musicians have the opportunity to share their own creations with a wider audience than friends and neighbors. The site itself is no longer available, but the content can be found in the Internet archive .
The first online newspaper in the world, The Tech, was opened by the Massachusetts University of Technology in May 1993.
A little later, the first website appeared with a “complex navigation structure” - Principia Cybernetica.
In March 1993, as soon as browsers learned how to display images, the world's first webcam was installed in the computer lab of the University of Cambridge, which transmitted the life of a coffee maker at 128 * 128 pixels, thanks to which everyone could find out if a coffee machine was free and not winding extra hundreds of meters through the corridors. The broadcast was completed in 2001, and the coffee machine itself was auctioned at eBay for ÂŁ 3,350. The second photo below captures the moment when the webcam was disconnected from the Internet.
The first search engines are WebCrawler and Yahoo! appear in 1994, then the first advertising banners appear. The current Wired portal has posted an AT & T banner ad:
In RuNet, the first site appears in 1994, it was available at www.ru , but today only its reproductions have survived.
But the Moshkov library , one of the first sites of the RuNet, has not changed its appearance so far. According to the author, he has no artistic taste, and due to the lack of design, the resource is light and looks the same on all devices.
By 1996, the Russian Internet already has 30-50 sites already, the first search engines appear - Rambler, and about a year later Yandex, which bypassed a competitor at the expense of better morphological analysis, as well as viral advertising on TV, already in the early 2000s:
It is noteworthy that at the beginning the search engines did not completely perceive the Cyrillic alphabet. And across the Internet, about 100,000 documents were indexed. Very interesting is the EvolutionWeb project , which displays how web technologies have evolved over time. This development took place both due to the increased connection speed and due to the increased power of computers, servers and the development of mobile devices for accessing the Internet.
It is noteworthy that if in the initial era, the Internet was used by users mainly for file sharing and the web as such did not exist, then with the arrival of cheap ADSL in 2004 in the Russian Federation, file sharing gained explosive popularity. In Russia, the first torrent tracker torrents.ru was created:
By 2008, the total speed of distribution exceeded the value of 172 Gbit / s, which amounted to 1/4 of the total traffic of the Moscow traffic exchange point MSK-IX. About 3 thousand requests from customers per second - 10 million per hour, 240 million per day. 40,000 packages per second on the network interface. 15,000 interrupts per second. 1200 processes around the top. Download on 8 nuclear machine - 10-12 at peak hours. And still, some of the requests dropped. Did not have time to service. Unfortunately, it was not possible to find the current value of peer-to-peer traffic, who knows - share in the comments for comparison.
In Ukraine, in August 2005, a regional tracker appeared - torrents.net.ua, the need to create a resource was due to the fact that the majority of users in Ukraine do not have high-speed and unlimited access to world traffic.
Until September 2008, the tracker was closed for users not from the UA-IX zone, therefore the number of users grew at a slow pace.
The first hosting providers
And what about the placement of sites? At the beginning, hosting providers, as such, did not exist. The websites were hosted on the servers of universities and organizations that have a permanent connection to the Internet. Tracking what happened in the period 1991-1995 is now quite problematic. In 1995, Angelfire offered free as much as 35KB of space for user pages, and GeoCities - a whole 1MB. For more information about the first steps of hosting, read the essay in the article “First steps of hosting” , which was published in our blog earlier and is today, perhaps, one of the most complete.
Interestingly, hosting in the USA, in 2000, was quite expensive :
$ 200 / month for 200 MB of quota on the server and 3000 MB of outgoing traffic (500 MB for the minimum tariff plan), and traffic over the limit was paid from $ 55 to $ 27 per GB). It was possible to connect a “dedicated line” for your site, the tariffs were as follows: 128K - $ 395 / month, 384K - $ 799 / month, 1M - $ 1200 / month. Connecting the “channel” and activating the hosting also provided for an installation fee of about one monthly fee. At the end of 2000, the same provider offered unlimited disk space with payment only for traffic and reduced the cost of traffic to $ 40 per 20 GB. And in 2002, he reduced tariffs to $ 20, made traffic "unlimited" and re-introduced quota restrictions.
Also interesting are the rental prices for the first dedicated servers in 2000:
A server with 8 GB HDD looks like a real “fossil” in today's time. But what to say, I personally used up to 2004 PCs with HDD, where the effective quota was about 7 GB. And of course, the fee of $ 5000 + / month for 6 Mbit / s to the server looks terrible now. Later, the price was reduced to $ 300 / Mbit, but still it was not enough.
It goes without saying that the decline in prices for connectivity and the cost of access to the Internet was due to an increase in the number of subscribers and the construction of new communication channels, including underwater optical highways. When you encounter all the complexity of laying cables across the ocean floor and learn the approximate cost of the project, it becomes clear why 1 Mbit / s across the Atlantic could cost $ 300 / month and even more. In more detail with the history of the development of the main underwater Internet networks you can find in our article:
Messages in depth: the amazing story of the underwater Internet
In Ukraine and the Russian Federation, the process of hosting their own sites began, perhaps, with free hosting narod.ru from Yandex , in 2000:
There was also a similar project from mail.ru - boom.ru, but this free hosting did not receive such distribution as the People. Subsequently, the free hosting of “Yandex” was absorbed by the most successful free website builder and hosting of 2008-2010 - “uCoz” and the opportunity to build a website using the tools “uCoz” is now available for the domain narod.ru. "Yandex" refused to "People" because of the development of social networks and reduced interest in the service to build their own sites.
Until 2002, it was beneficial for Ukraine to host its own servers, except for home network providers, although most kept their servers in offices and even at home due to very expensive traffic for collocation services, although this violated the terms of service for home subscribers. Many who simply preferred to use ordinary stationary computers for this purpose and not spend money on server hardware. Such aksakals are found in our days. But if then it was possible to understand why I wanted to make myself a “hosting” at home, but now it is difficult to understand. And it's not about people who like to do tests and need a server at home for this.
The situation abroad was better, because there the Internet became accessible to the public earlier and the development process was started earlier. «» , , , , , IT-c.
1997 , , -, - . - - 1998 , , :
2003 :
, 4 2000 512 / . , «» , (IP-). , LeaseWeb , -, , - , .
, DSL 2003-2005 LeaseWeb KPN ( 27,5 400 / DSL 82,5 4 / , 160-700 / ):
LeaseWeb World Access , IP-, LeaseWeb. 2005 , — 256K, 512K, 1M, 2M 8 50 .
LeaseWeb - Macromedia Flash Communication Server MX:
99 64 / 599 / . - 9 / 5 - 1 145 250 25 .
, . :
Dell Power Edge 750/C 2.4 GHz / 4GB RAM / 40GB HDD 67 + 12.5 ( 1 ) + + ( 50 500 200 2000 , 20-2 , ).
( ) , -. 2006 , 10 / , 249 :
, , — :)
— «», , - . «» , . , , . , , , -, .
- «», 2006 :
, . , , , . , , , 2 30% , , .
, - , , , . , - . % 5% .
, - «» , , . - «» , .
? The answer is very simple. , . , , , . «colo» , , , , , , , , , .
«colo» - .
- . , :
— . :
1/4 .
.
: .
:
1/4 30 ./.
8,7 ./
, - , MSK-IX, SPB-IX ( ), , 9 10 ( ) . % , . , 2017 , , , ! 40 , 986 , 40 / 80 / .
, 2017 , , 10 :
, -, youtube, , . … , torrent - , … . , . ! ! : « , !», — IPhone .
About the VOLS project itself You can watch a detailed video here: part 1 , part 2 , part 3 , part 4 . The only thing to note is that the journalists made inaccuracies, according to their words, the same satellite channel was only 1 Gbit / s per city, although in fact the total traffic before the introduction of the FOCL was about 2.5 Gbit / s. Well, you need to understand that the problem was not only speed, but also how much in high ping, which was obtained by using satellite Internet, which came back again at the time of the accident on the VOLS .
At the end of 2006, the first sites with movies online, file sharing and other similar resources appear in the Russian Federation, and in order to reduce the cost of foreign traffic, as Ukrainian traffic can be impressive and not fit into the ratios prescribed by the same Agave, some of the servers are large projects try to place in data centers with connection to UA-IX or create additional Russian traffic artificially, using torrent'y, which were distributed exclusively to Russian users, and in some cases file sharing services that were available exclusively for Russian IP addresses. As a result, if Ukraine wanted to download fully and at a good speed, many of the users bought a Russian VPN, since the speed for the same ifolder.ru was always higher from the Russian Federation:
File sharing, despite the popularity of torrent, is gaining explosive popularity, since the download speed is often much higher than when using torrent, and there is no need to distribute and maintain rating (when you give more than you download, or at least no more than 3 times less). The asymmetric DSL channel, when the speed at the return was significantly lower than the speed at the reception (10 times or more), is to blame for this, and you should not forget that not every user wanted to “sit” and store many files on his computer.
That is why the same rapidshare.com, which dates back to 2004 , when a similar project was opened in the rapidshare.de domain, turned out to be so popular that already in 2005 the storage capacity exceeded 1000 TB, and the total volume of the planned generated traffic became 80 Gbit / s:
Of course, such connectivity needed to be paid for somehow, the monetization scheme was mainly due to premium accounts, which allowed downloading several files and high speed from 100 to 300 seconds without a captcha. The cost of a premium account started from 4.5 euros for 2 days of access and reached up to 79 euros per year:
Subsequently, the premium account allowed you to upload files of several hundred megabytes in size, which was convenient, since the same film did not have to be divided into 10-30 parts depending on the volume, the number of archives was less. At that time, WinRAR became a popular archiver, which allowed adding parity to the files (recovery information up to 5% of the actual file size), which avoided the archive's bit rate and restored the file from a number of archives to full.
It is also worth noting that many providers at that time had connections to different backbone providers and therefore the download speed could very much depend on what backbone networks went through the traffic. Therefore, on the same rapidshare, there was a choice between Cogent, Telia and Level (3). The situation with speed improved after the growth in the number of providers connected to the German traffic exchange point DE-CIX, to which, by the way, even providers from Ukraine, such as Wnet, were directly connected.
Therefore, already in 2006, wnet.ua proposed an almost similar Agave tariff, European collocation :
So, “Wnet” paid the subscriber Ukrainian traffic at the rate of $ 1 per GB, while foreign traffic cost the subscriber $ 10 per GB, provided that the ratio of outgoing traffic to incoming traffic was 4/1. Certainly - it was still a significant fee, because traffic turned out to be free only if there was 10 times more Ukrainian traffic. Thus, in order to generate 9 Mbit / s abroad for free, it was necessary to generate 90 Mbit / s to Ukraine. That was completely different from the proposal of Agave, where it was enough that foreign traffic did not exceed Russian.
Therefore, the earlier considered offer from the Volia data center was much more profitable than the offer from Wnet, which also, on October 1, 2006, decided to exit from the UA-IX Ukrainian traffic exchange point, since UA-IX refused to sell more ports that were needed by Wnet, possibly as a result of a peer-to-peer war, namely lobbying the interests of other providers that Wnet began to compete with, and maybe because of the lack of those. the possibility of providing additional ports, or perhaps because Wnet violated the agreement and built peering inclusions with other participants of the exchange point (the feature of the exchange rules
From April 14, 2007 , Volya introduces a tariff with unlimited outgoing traffic abroad for the most expensive tariff plan for UAH 1399 / month ($ 280) :
Due to this, in 2008, Volia already had 20 Gbit / s connection to UA-IX and 4 Gbit / s to the world from several trunk operators. Further development of the hosting services market can be traced already in our history:
"Ua-hosting.company" or how to become a hosting provider from scratch and generate traffic more than the whole of Belarus
Since we started to provide hosting services from 2006 among the users of our resource, and since July 2009 we have allocated services to a separate project - ua-hosting.com.ua, which in the future went international and completely moved abroad and is now known Under the ua-hosting.company brand and is available through the short domain http://ua.hosting .
It is worth noting that over the past 10 years, the market has undergone tremendous changes, and the reason for this is not only a significant reduction in the cost of main channels, but also a redistribution of the audience among a multitude of projects, due to the closure of once popular projects. Successful resources such as file sharing, which occupied the top places in terms of attendance in the Alexa ranking, fell into oblivion, for many reasons, but mostly because of the ongoing war with the rightholders.
So in Ukraine, once famous ex.ua, which generates over 15% of all traffic of the Ukrainian exchange point UA-IX (in fact, traffic exchange points in Kiev, since regional operators were rarely represented, especially with the advent of the exchange point Giganet and DTEL-IX) was closed after closing no less famous fs.to, who bought at one time 100 Gbit / s in the Netherlands from us. And the deal with the once famous megauload was even more resonant when over 600 servers of this file sharing service were withdrawn from the data center in the Netherlands where we are located. Rutracker was blocked on the territory of the Russian Federation by Roskomnadzor, and torrents.net.ua in Ukraine ceased to exist due to fear of reprisals.
The audience went to Youtube, Instagram and other social. network. Sites for an adult audience, perhaps, have not lost popularity, only now the earnings on teaser ads for our webmasters from the Russian Federation and Ukraine have lost all meaning due to the prices for advertising and paying for foreign channels, the price of which, by the way, has decreased several times in comparison, even with 2012, when it seemed that it could not be cheaper already, it became quite problematic.
Situation in the market of main channels, which determines the relative cost of traffic delivery
As we could understand, having familiarized yourself with the information presented above, the price of Internet traffic depends on where the traffic is to be delivered to, how popular this direction is, how fast it is to transfer data to the stream and with what delay. As well as the price will depend on what channels of communication the traffic will go through, which determines how direct the route is and what priority the traffic will be in one way or another, which in turn determines the final latency (ping) value from one point to another.
For example, 10 Gbit / s from Novy Urengoy to Norilsk will obviously cost not $ 2,000 / month or even $ 6,000 / month, since more than $ 40 million was invested in the construction of the fiber-optic cable line, the monthly cost of the channel in 40 Gbit / s is 40/15/12 = $ 0.22 million or $ 55,000 / month for 10 Gbit / s and this is not a channel on the Internet, but only the cost of delivering traffic via high-quality fiber-optic communication lines between two remote locations. And this money needs to be taken now from the population of Norilsk, which will watch the same Youtube (the traffic to which will cost even more, since it will be necessary to pay the highways for delivery up to the Youtube networks), which means the traffic from it will be quite expensive and the activity of the population there will be held back by this price. There is an option when Youtube may want to be closer to its users and wants to pay part of the cost of the channel to them instead of them, in this case, the cost of access to the Youtube resource for the population of Norilsk may become lower. This example clearly demonstrates what the price of access to specific Internet resources can consist of. Someone always pays for your traffic, and if it’s not you, then either the advertisers and resources that generate this traffic, or the backbone provider or just an Internet provider who benefits from this traffic (for example, to get discounts on other referrals or any tax breaks that may be beneficial in the case of Norilsk or simply because a fairly wide channel has been bought to get a discount on the delivery of traffic and it stands idle).
The main level I operators, such as Cogent, Telia, Level 3, Tata and others, differ in that they charge for the delivery of traffic from everyone who is connected to them, because traffic generators are trying to exchange traffic with providers where their audience is located directly. Thus, there are situations when the so-called peering wars are generated, including between the first-level trunk operators and large generators, when priority is given to specific consumers, while for others the price of cooperation can be artificially inflated, in order to crush a competitor, or just for the purpose of enrichment, since the traffic generator simply does not have other options. Therefore, disputes often arose, including litigation, as some companies did not maintain net neutrality and tried to do it in a very veiled way.
So, the dispute between Cogent and Google regarding IPv6 traffic has not yet been resolved, which is why it is simply impossible to peer between companies for a direct exchange . Cogent requires money from Google for traffic on their network, but Google wants to get free, because the mass of Cogent subscribers (data centers, home Internet providers) are active consumers of traffic from Google networks, by the way, IPv4, and not IPv6, which would reduce the delay and reduce the cost of traffic for these subscribers, subject to the growth of% IPv6 traffic. But Cogent is apparently unprofitable, as it is a backbone provider of Level I, and external traffic from its networks is paid for by backbone providers of the second (they are paid by backbone providers of I level and get profit from the third level providers) and even of the third level (they are paid to second level providers and get money from end customers).
In order to understand what constitutes the final price of traffic for a resource, consider the situation on the example of the popular service Cloudflare, the essence of which is to make websites “closer” to its audience, to help reduce the load on the infrastructure, caching static information and filter possible DDOS attacks.
Of course, that Cloudflare hosts servers in all regions where there is a demand for traffic, that is, almost all over the world. And in order to save on traffic, he tries to enter into peer-to-peer agreements with regional providers who are able to deliver traffic from Cloudflare to users for free, bypassing the expensive Tier I backbone operators who charge for traffic in any case. Why is it profitable for local providers? With significant volumes of traffic, they also need to pay, like Cloudflare, Tier I level operators significant funds for traffic delivery, where it is more profitable to connect their channel “directly” (invest once in construction) and receive traffic for free, rather than pay monthly big money to the trunk operator. Even in cases where direct peering is not possible, it is more profitable to connect through networks of other transit providers, where the cost of traffic will be much lower than the cost of traffic when transmitting via Tier I. Yes, the route becomes not very direct, the ping may increase slightly, the transmission rate may slightly decrease on stream, but quality can still be acceptable for making such savings.
But it is not always possible to enter into peer-to-peer agreements, yet in some regions Cloudflare is forced to buy a fairly large% of connectivity from backbone providers, and the price of traffic varies greatly, depending on the region. Unlike some cloud services, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or traditional CDNs, which often pay for traffic almost by the way, Cloudflare pays for maximum use of the channel for a certain period of time (the so-called "traffic flow"), based on the maximum number of megabits per second, which are used during the month at any of the main providers. This accounting method is called burstable, and a special case is the 95th percentile. 95 percentile is a method used to provide flexibility and batch use of channel width. This allows the consumer to exceed the bandwidth established by the tariff by 5% of the total time of using the channel, without increasing the cost. For example, if your tariff involves the use of a bandwidth of 5 Mbit / s, then the maximum bandwidth limit of the channel can be exceeded by 36 hours each month (5% of 30 days). The bandwidth used is measured and recorded every 5 minutes during the month as an average value over this small five-minute period of time. Measurement of the used bandwidth in each time interval occurs by dividing the amount of transmitted data over the interval by 300 seconds (the duration of the specified interval). At the end of the month, 5% of maximum values ​​are removed, and then the maximum number is selected from the remaining 95%, and it is this value that is used to calculate the payment for the channel width.
Legend has it that in the early days of its existence, Google used contracts with 95 percentiles in order to carry out indexing with a very high bandwidth during one 24-hour period, and during the rest of the time the intensity of traffic consumption was significantly lower, thereby providing significant savings on payment consumed channels. Clever, but certainly not a very durable strategy, since later they still had to build their own data centers and even channels to index resources more often and pay less for intercontinental traffic.
Another "subtlety" is that you usually pay backbone providers for the prevailing traffic (inbound or outbound), which in the case of CloudFlare allows you to completely unpaid inbound traffic. After all, CloudFlare is a caching proxy service, in consequence of which the outcome (out) usually exceeds the input (in) by about 4-5 times. Therefore, bandwidth pricing occurs solely on the values ​​of outgoing traffic, which allows not to pay for the entrance completely. For the same reason, the service does not charge an additional fee when the site is hit by a DDOS attack. The attack certainly increases the consumption of incoming traffic, but if the attack is not very large, the incoming traffic will still not exceed outgoing and, therefore, it will not increase the cost of the channels used.
Most peer-to-peer traffic is usually free, which cannot be said about traffic from the Netflix service, which after long debates had to pay Verizon and Comcast for peer-to-peer connections in order to ensure acceptable video streaming speed for users of these operators.
In the diagram above, we can see how the number of free peering inclusions of Cloudflare is increasing over the course of 3 months, both with IPv4 and with the IPv6 version of the Internet protocol. And below, also within 3 months, we can observe the global growth of Cloudflare peering traffic, which currently uses more than 3000 peering inclusions and saves about 45% of funds to pay for expensive transit traffic.
Cloudflare does not disclose how much it pays for transit backbone traffic, but gives comparative values ​​from different regions from which it is possible to make a rough conclusion about the amount of costs.
Consider early North America. Let's assume that as a benchmark in North America, we take a mixed average for all transit providers of $ 10 per Mbit / s per month. , , . , 1 / 10 000 ( , , , , , , ).
($10 / ) ($ 0 / ). , , , . , , . . Cloudflare , - .
, , Cloudflare 45% , - 20-25%, 1 / $7,5-8 / . . ?
, , , , % , , — , % Cloudflare 45-50%.
$4,5-5 / . % — AMS-IX , DE-CIX LINX . , , , , Equinix -, , . 2014 1200 , 400.
, , Cloudflare 50-55%. 6-7 $70 / . $28-32 / , 6-7 , .
. , , -. - - . , , — , , . , - , , , «» .
, Cloudflare 3 % 0 60%.
, , . 17 , $68 / , , , , . , - «carrier neutral», . , Cloudflare - -, , 60% .
Cloudflare , , , . % 50%, Telstra — - , $200 / , 20 . 2015 $100 / . , Cloudflare , 33 (22 750 ).
, , — $140 / Cloudflare 90% , $14 / . - , , , , 100 -. Middle East 100%, CloudFlare , -.
2 , 2016, — , 15% , $85 / . , Cloudflare, :
, , 6 — HiNet, Korea Telecom, Optus, Telecom Argentina, Telefonica, Telstra, Cloudflare , , . Cloudflare 6 6% , 50% , , 6 . , Cloudflare «» - ( -), , , , , Telstra , , , , Cloudflare, .
Telegeography — , , , , . , , .
Dedicated Internet Access (DIA) , - . , $6 $8 / .
, , 2 Intel Dodeca-Core Xeon E5-2650 v4 128GB DDR4 6 x 480GB SSD 1Gbps 100 $249 / , 300+ / , 1 / $6 / , ?
- ?
-, , EvoSwitch , , , , . 2017 .
, 5,5 / , 36 , 2000 , 25 . , , , , , , - . , — , , , -. - «» - , , , -.
. , - , , oversell'a, , , - , . , , .
Consider an example. 10 100 / , 100% . , 300 / 1 / , — 2 / ( ) . — 700 / , , 100 / 10 , , 100 / «» , - , . , , 500 , , — 166 / , 300 /. 334 / , , .
, 100 / , . . 1000 100 / 10-15 / , , 10-15% . 100 / - , , , . , , , . %, , 50 5% . , , « », , , 100 / , — . , , , .
-, . , 100% , , 100%, 10-20% ( , ). , - , .
, , % 10-15% 50% , -, 100 / , , . , 1 / 10 / , , 1 / 100 / , 1 / , , , . , , , , . 1Gbps 100 10%, , , 10 .
- , - , , «» . , . - , , , «» .
oversell'a , , 10 Gbps Unmetered , , , . . 50 10 Gbps Unmetered , 250 / , , 900+ 100 / 1 / . 10 / $3000 / , — 2 ( $1800 ). , .
C , I Cogent, — $1199 10 / $4999 40 Gbit / s Unmetered.
https://ua-hosting.company/serversnl — , — . .
2 Xeon E5-2650 / 128GB / 8x512GB SSD / 10Gbps — $1199
2 Xeon E5-2650 / 256GB / 24x512GB SSD / 10Gbps — $2099
2 Xeon E5-2650 / 256GB / 24x1TB SSD / 10Gbps — $3599
2 Xeon E5-2650 / 256GB / 24x2TB SSD / 10Gbps — $6599
2 Xeon E5-2650 / 256GB / 8x1TB SSD / 20Gbps — $1999
2 Xeon E5-2650 / 256GB / 24x512GB SSD / 20Gbps — $2999
2 Xeon E5-2650 / 256GB / 24x1TB SSD / 20Gbps — $4599
2 Xeon E5-2650 / 256GB / 24x2TB SSD / 20Gbps — $7599
2 Xeon E5-2650 / 256GB / 24x512GB SSD / 40Gbps — $4999
2 Xeon E5-2650 / 256GB / 24x1TB SSD / 40Gbps — $5599
2 Xeon E5-2650 / 256GB / 24x2TB SSD / 40Gbps — $8599
100Gbps Unmetered , , .
, Cogent , , . RAID-, 6 / , « » . , , . Cogent . , , . , Cogent, , . , , , .
, , 10, 40 100 / , - , . - - , $55 000 10 / , — , . , — . , 10 / , Ultra HD 1000-4000 «» .
. 10 / , $400 / «» .
, Wi-Fi, « » ( 300 / ), , , . Why do you need it? . James Busch, , .
« 200 , PET 3D 10 . . , 7 10 / . , , , , 20-30 , , 10 , .»
, — 10, 20, 40 100 , . , 1 10 / .
. , - , . , , 2005 . . , . , . - , . , — . , . - -, , - 0 , ! . , !
BLACK FRIDAY : 30% - BLACK30% 1-6 !
These are not just virtual servers! This is a VPS (KVM) with dedicated drives, which can be no worse than dedicated servers, and in most cases - better! We made VPS (KVM) with dedicated drives in the Netherlands and the USA (configurations from VPS (KVM) - E5-2650v4 (6 Cores) / 10GB DDR4 / 240GB SSD or 4TB HDD / 1Gbps 10TB available at a uniquely low price - from $ 29 / month , options are available with RAID1 and RAID10) , do not miss the chance to place an order for a new type of virtual server, where all resources belong to you, as on a dedicated one, and the price is much lower, with a much more productive hardware!
How to build the infrastructure of the building. class c using servers Dell R730xd E5-2650 v4 worth 9000 euros for a penny? Dell R730xd 2 times cheaper? Only we have 2 x Intel Dodeca-Core Xeon E5-2650v4 128GB DDR4 6x480GB SSD 1Gbps 100 TV from $ 249 in the Netherlands and the USA!
PS , Geektimes — 20 , 20 10 ? , . , -, . . , / ?
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/342140/
All Articles