Cost of YouTube Service on Amazon S3

YouTube hit a milestone recently - it served 1 billion videos per day. I was wondering how much it would cost Google to serve these videos. It seems to be a lot but how much?

Since we don't know Google's hosting costs, let's calculate it in a different way - from the published rates of Amazon S3 service. Note that this calculation is primarily focused on storage and bandwidth costs.

Here are some stats to work with:

• average video size on YouTube is 10 MB (maybe slightly dated)
• videos served per month 30 billion
• 20 hours of video uploaded each minute, or 864,000 hours of video per month
• average size of 1 hour of video = 0.5GB (calculated at bit-rate of 1150 kbps for VCD quality vide0)

Data transferred out per month to view the videos is:

30billion * 10MB = 300 billion MB = 292,968750 GB

From the Amazon S3 calculator, this comes to $29 million/month.

Cost of videos transferred in per month is:

0.5GB * 864000 = 432,000 GB

From the Amazon S3 calculator, it is $43,200/month.

Data transfer out dominates the data transfer-in costs.

Storing the new video each month costs $66,000/month. (Cost of holding previous videos is not calculated since I don't have that data).

The grand total is around $29,366,380/month or about $352 million per year. The real cost to Google would be lower than this (perhaps by 10-20%), but $352 million seems to be the upper limit for this year. This is quite similar to the estimates made by Credit Suisse report.

Cost of Amazon s3 vs Apple's MobileMe

I have been using Apple's MobileMe as a backup solution for a while and was wondering if Amazon S3 would work out cheaper than MobileMe. With Firefox extension such as S3Fox it is equally easy to use Amazon s3 for backup.

MobileMe costs $99/year for 20GB storage and 200GB of data transfer per month. Using the Amazon Calculator, I entered the following numbers:

• Storage: 20 GB-months, i.e., using the full storage of 20GB per month
• Data transfer in: 100GB/month, and Data transfer out: 100 GB/month. This is assuming my data transfer is equally used between input and output. This is usually not the case but let's assume it for simplicity in calculation.

The Amazon S3 cost comes to $3 for storage/month and $27 for data-transfer/month, for a grand total of $30/month, or $360/year, a whopping 3.6 times more than MobileMe.

More than the storage, it is the data-transfer costs that add up at Amazon. So if you were to go easy on the data-transfer (a typical use case when used as a backup), then the costs will come down.

What is the break even point? After tweaking the numbers, I found that if you store approximately 20GB/month and your data transfer is approximately 40GB/month (in and out included), then the price of Amazon s3 and Apple's MobileMe are the same. Beyond this, MobileMe is a better value.

In other words, Amazon S3 is a better value if you are mainly interested in using it as a storage device and data-transfer is small. On the other hand, if your data-transfer needs are high (e.g., as in hosting a popular video), MobileMe is better value.

Kindle App on the iPhone

Recently, I was very excited about buying the new Kindle with international wireless. After doing a little bit of research, I stumbled upon the Kindle App for iPhone. Guess what, it is an excellent app. You can easily buy books from the Kindle store and it will appear on your iPhone. The iPhone app was so easy to use that I wonder if it is really necessary to buy the Kindle Reader.

Granted that the Kindle reader has a bigger screen and the battery lasts longer than the iPhone, but the iPhone screen is good enough for me. If you intend to read a book continuously for a long time, the Kindle may be better on your eyes, but for a quick read to kill time, the iPhone is good enough.

One thing I found lacking in the Kindle app for iPhone is the settings button. There is no way to prevent the app from using the wifi/3G/GPRS network for internet access when you don't want it to.