Survival Core: Eliminating Bandwidth Costs From Fncore.com
When I launched Trombonest I added an autoplaying video to https://fncore.com.
Every time someone hits my site they load a 7 MB video, probably in its entirety.
On social media posts I tend to link posts about Trombonest to its Meta Experience page, but when someone hits my website I end up serving a 7 MB video.
I’ve converged on hosting my websites on Digital Ocean App Platform: 
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Yes, that’s a referral link.
Bandwidth Costs
I just got a bill for last month’s bandwidth fees and I went over my 1 GiB limit and had to pay $0.25 for 2.51GB @ $0.10/GB.
For close to 10 years I spent $5 / month for a VPS with them, but in the last few years I’ve converged on only using their free App Platform which lets me host 3 basic projects (jekyll sites) for free.
I know what you’re thinking. Yes, I’m writing a blogpost about saving $0.25 cents. And I don’t think they’re actually going to charge me since it’s under $1. But it’s more about what this represents.
I’m fairly happy with their service, but I’m anxious that it will eventually be shutdown or become a paid product. If that happens, I’ll probably migrate to GitHub pages.
App Platform is integrated with Cloudflare CDN, so theoretically my site’s assets load fast.
I don’t know if I’m paying the bandwidth for each access of Trombonest’s autoplaying video, or each time the CDN re-caches it.
Either way, I want to avoid paying anything, since I expect to have 4-5 VR apps in the next year and 10,000 X scaling of traffic would start to cost money when I could spend probably less time than it takes to write this blog post to migrate the video file out of the git repo and just serve the video from YouTube.
Edit: yep, it took about 10 minutes to load the video as a YouTube short instead.