zlacker

>>mikece+(OP)
> Storage: $1.3 million dollars per year.

> Servers: $2.9 million dollars per year.

> Registration Fees: $6 million dollars per year.

> Total Bandwidth: $2.8 million dollars per year.

> Additional Services: $700,000 dollars per year.

Signal pays more for delivering verification SMS during sign-up, than for all other infrastructure (except traffic) combined. Wow, that sounds excessive.

>>Duneda+Z
> we can rent server infrastructure from a variety of providers like Amazon AWS, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure

Moving off cloud services to lower-cost provider like Hetzner, Vultr and DigitalOcean might provide a lot of cost savings.

I also imagine they're using managed SMS services from one of these clouds, and moving off them to a combination of local SMS gateways in each country can also further reduce costs (and in one case I've personally observed, by upto two orders of magnitude). This obviously pushes a lot of complexity on Signal's side, but is usually worth it.

>>supriy+y7
Any idea what prevents Signal from using cheaper alternatives?

Edit: I meant moving off cloud to Hetzner, Vultr, DigitalOcean.

>>slaw+La
In business, you get what you pay for. Cheaper hosting might raise more issues that need to by handled by your employees, who also are expensive, and also the organization's focus gets disrupted. The hosting company / cloud vendor has an enormous economic advantage, with access to the entire hardware and software stack, the engineers who built it, people whose full-time job is operating it. Often it's cheaper to pay more for better.

As I have to explain about open source, 'Free is only free if your time is worth nothing.' (And I use a lot of FOSS, it just not always the solution.)

>>wolver+Nu
>Free is only free if your time is worth nothing

This is the worst take in technology. The main value of FOSS is freedom, not time or money savings. For many people freedom is more valuable than either.

Also, FOSS and managed aren't mutually exclusive.