Storage and bandwidth are important concerns when selling digital goods. Digital content sales tend to involve the transfer of a significant amount of data. Video is especially data intensive, as even with modern compression codecs, file sizes still amount to hundreds of megabytes.
Even a moderately popular video download can quickly consume many gigabytes of bandwidth. Imagine our fictional Cranberry Merchant website decides to sell a short, 20-minute instructional video on Cranberry farming. The video is compressed using a high-performance H.264 codec and is sold as a direct download (as opposed to streaming).
The video quickly becomes a small hit and soon hundreds of amateur Cranberry farmers are clamoring to learn from it. Over 200 downloads were sold in the first day it launched. Each 30-minute, high-definition video file weighs in at 800MB. Video sales consumed 160GB of bandwidth in a single day.
Every web hosting provider offers different bandwidth pricing...