I’m looking at starting a service that involves hosting a lot of LLM models, which are often going to be 16GB+ (compressed). I did a bit of searching for cloud storage providers with cheap egress, and the cheapest I could find is $0.01 per GB, which would still be $0.16+ per download.
How do sites like Huggingface or CivitAI do it? Lots of VC funding?
That’s true, but I just checked a few CDNs and you won’t find one for less than $.01/GB. The lowest I found was $.03/GB.
To keep costs down and depending on how much you want to get your hands dirty, you could start investigating renting dedicated servers. Some hosting providers offer unmetered network connectivity. Here’s something from OVH: https://www.ovhcloud.com/en/bare-metal/rise/rise-stor-1/
And hey, depending on how grassroots the project is, there’s always bittorrent! ;)
I was considering this. The hosting provider we use for model training runs doesn’t charge for ingress/egress. Their storage costs would eat us alive though haha. OVH looks much more promising.