said by SpaethCo:said by kamm:ANother full of BS astroturfer reply - wholesale bandwidth prices are ALWAYS FALLING and pipes are getting fatter and fatter.
This doesn't magically happen though. You know what, hard drives are getting cheaper and larger every day. How much did your hard drive magically increase in size last month?
It isn't cheaper for you to add more storage -- you'd have to spend cash to get more capacity -- but you'll get more storage for your dollar this time around than you did the last time you bought a hard drive. Except eventually you run out of what is feasible to put into a single box for storage and you end up buying a SAN storage array and building out the SAN infrastructure to support it, etc.
Capacity augmentation is a system-wide expense.
I remember my first 1GB drive, paid $250. Now I can buy a 2TB drive for the exact same number of dollars, $250. That's a 2,000-fold increase in capacity. And a proportionate drop in price due to inflation.
2,000-fold increase in capacity for the same price. Think about it.
Fun With Math!
$250/1GB = $250 per GB.
$250/2TB = $0.125 per GB!!!!
If instead of substituting, I'm adding, I end up paying $0.249 per GB because I paid a total $500 for 2,001GB. The same principle applies to bandwidth. As cheaper and faster alternatives are invented, the total price per Mbps drops, and the total available bandwidth increases.
But you're right, it always costs more to add stuff. But then I'm right too, it always costs less per unit.
But if I keep adding 2TB drives, I pay less and less and less per GB. Now imagine a 3ZB (ziggabyte, hugelol) drive for $50. Or a 4GB or 4GpB (googolbyte, googolplexbyte) drive.
15 years ago, 56K = $30/month
Today, 5Mbps = $30/month
100-fold increase in speed for the same price. How can this be unless wholesale bandwidth has grown cheaper?