Is traffic really that high?

Question

Data storage

I look at the traffic in some DigitalOcean and the like, and everywhere the prices are around $0.01 per GiB
But that's a lot!

For example, on a page there are 5 pictures of 1Mb each, this is 5Mb per page
1 million views * 5Mb = 5,000GB
5,000 * $0.01 = $50 per 1ml of views

It
's damn expensive not in RuNet, so there will be even more visits) - you got money

Opening some kind of blogging service is also a so-so idea, because you won’t earn much on advertising, especially considering adblock

How do beginners/small services survive? Do they have different rates?
At this rate, E1 or similar portals should work purely for traffic.

Answer 1

• You can set up Cloudflare for a free CDN.
  
• You can keep pictures on a separate one, you can do it without vps / vds, maybe free hosting.
  
• The same on a paid one, for three dollars, with very weak computing power but fast SSD drives and unlimited traffic.
  

Answer 2

On the same digitalocean, for a minimum VPS with a tariff of $5 per month, you have 1 TB of traffic already included in the tariff.
To start a blog with 1 million views within a month, it should no longer be a local private blog, but something very popular. It didn't just shoot, it mega-shot. And it's only $5.
That's even monthly small money for a person who is viewed by 1-10-100 million people every month. With such views, you can beat it all off on an advertising banner with a margin.

How do start-ups/small services survive?

They don't have millions of views, or they don't use digitalocean with VPS, but cheap shared hosting for $1, with more traffic. Or they store static on separate CDNs, there are also free ones for a small number of images.

Answer 3

Yes, cloud service vendors know what is really valuable and what is not.
About pictures, and expensive traffic, there have been technologies for a long time (but they are not used for reasons of ignorance and complexity, probably) - this is webrtc. When data is loaded not from the main servers, but from clients who are currently using the service and have already downloaded this data.
Keywords peerjs, webrtc, p2p, webtorrent
The technology is ideal for heavy content, thanks to ready-made libraries it is not complicated, although there is no guarantee that it will be used, since providers (especially mobile ones) put spokes in the wheel, so I do not recommend relying on it completely.