Egress — the price of moving a byte out to a viewer — decides which media archives survive popularity. Storage prices are advertised; egress prices are buried. This page does the arithmetic for the Anarchive.
## The Arithmetic
An 8 MB fair-use clip viewed a thousand times moves 8 GB. A 300 MB archived talk watched by a hundred people moves 30 GB. At AWS-style egress rates ($0.09 per GB) popularity becomes a fine; at Cloudflare R2's rate it is free.
## The Policies
- Cloudflare R2 — $0, unconditional. - Backblaze B2 — free up to 3× stored data, free without limit through Cloudflare, then $0.01 per GB. - Wasabi — an unpublished fair-use policy that bites when egress consistently exceeds storage. Fine for backup, wrong for public media. - Hetzner Cloud — 20 TB of traffic included with even the smallest VPS, which makes self-serving viable at our scale.
## The Rule
Keep the origin cheap, and put a zero-egress layer in front of anything the public watches. Bulk bytes belong on the cheapest store; popular bytes belong behind Cloudflare or R2. The Media Plan's clip discipline — small fair-use clips, not whole-programme mirrors — is also an egress policy.
# See