I would be interested to know pageviews/bandwidth because this feels like it's still at the scale of it could run on a single box (rather than Heroku or a whole kubernetes cluster as seems to be the current case). For reference, we served a genealogy image/audio/video site from two servers behind an LB for ~$60/mo and handled 100K pageviews a day with nary a bother.
I would second this. Based on the initial numbers he provided (1 million images served a month, image size between 10kb and 1mb) I would expect to be able to trivially host this on pretty much anything in any major metro.
Even at his worst case (all images are 1mb) - they're only serving ~1tb per month in image data (admittedly, he mentioned these were stale numbers, so it'll have increased since then).
But I serve 1tb/month (actually much more than this) on old gaming machines sitting in my basement with just a standard comcast business line, just hosting media for my extended family.
I pay 200/m for the business line, and then another 15 in electric costs. And I need the internet either way.
Nope. I'm paying for a business line. I'm using what's allocated to that business line (actually FAR under what's allocated most times).
Every now and then I get a rep calling trying to upsell me, and that's about it.
At the end of 2 years they wanted to renew me. So my strong suspicion is they don't care in the slightest.
I'll add - I've also done this on a consumer Google Fiber line (which is more restrictive in the sense that contractually I can't host paid services). They also don't blink an eye when I push out 10mbps (or 500mpbs) over extended periods.
