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Nicholas Lovell
Home   >   Sandbox   >   Facebook spends more on electricity than on bandwidth

Facebook spends more on electricity than on bandwidth

By on November 3, 2008

A TechCrunch article on Friday talks about Facebook’s need to seek new capital, together with an estimated breakdown of costs.

Bandwidth: $500,000 per month

Electricity: $1 million per month

Storage: $4 million + per month, simply in new servers.

I know that Facebook isn’t the most bandwidth intensive business, but that its electricity bill is double its bandwidth bill surprised me. Equally, it is spending far, far more on keeping data than it is on delivering data. Is this scaleable? Or will Facebook have to start deleting unused content over time?

Many people starting new and growing web businesses factor in bandwidth and servers. But electricity as a massive technology line item: that’s a new one on me.

About Nicholas Lovell

Nicholas is the founder of Gamesbrief, a blog dedicated to the business of games. It aims to be informative, authoritative and above all helpful to developers grappling with business strategy. He is the author of a growing list of books about making money in the games industry and other digital media, including How to Publish a Game and Design Rules for Free-to-Play Games, and Penguin-published title The Curve: thecurveonline.com