cheapest way/servers for streaming service

stefeman

@lifehost360_com said:
cheaper than 40€ / Month?? seriously??

we´re hosting a VoD-portal for governmental critics news at our Helsinki DC... The customer does approx. 200TB of traffic a month and has to pay 1400€ monthly just for the streaming- and apiservers and to get access to 10G Uplink. (it´s a bit more necessary to serve their up to 30k users...)

good luck finding any competitor.

Ahh, Tokentube lol

Yeah, I heard they got kicked from the previous host.

lifehost360_com

@stefeman said:

Ahh, Tokentube lol

nope

hanoi

@TheDevil said:

@hanoi said:
Cheap, reliable bandwidth for streaming, Ignore DCMA?
Take a look at some illegal movies /jav video sites. What hosting and technology they used, seem fit for your requirements.

not really because look at gogoanime they were literally using google cloud a moment ago xD

They seem do some tricks like google image proxy I have seen before in black SEO, but in their case I think they abusing Google app engine.

Andrews

@afn said:
Hi There,

We are hosting a private streaming service for a specific archive (data does not grow/increase much). Our storage space is around 1.5 TB and we have a lot of visitors, and the numbers keeps increasing like crazy.
At first, we were using two small dedis from online.net with round-robin DNS and mirroring the content on both servers, but the approach was not so easy to use and we gave up on it when cloudflare kicked us out (their CDN can’t be used for video). Now we are using 1 single server (i7-2600, 6TB HDD) but the server and the drives can’t keep up with the demand.

Also, some of the uploads are by users and some of them of them may violate DMCA, we do not refuse to comply in theory, but we would like to avoid the trouble so we must have our streaming service protected with proxy. Currently we have the server behind a couple of VPSes to hide the real IP and we are using round robin DNS so each user gets directed to a VPS proxy randomly but all VPSes redirect to the same server. The server always has at least 100 people connected to stream, and doing 200+ TB of traffic monthly.

What are the cheapest solutions/improvements we can do to improve the watching experience a bit while remaining on budget (currently we pay around 40€ for the dedi+proxies)? replace by multiple small servers? 1 single better server? other tweaks?

Thanks in advance

you are thinking about it in old fashion way:)

now you are serving some video, and if 100 users want to watch it in this moment you are sending 100 streams to them. so it 100 times consumes your monthly bandwidth and requires your whole network to have at least 100 x video bitrate speed

let’s take a modern approach for it. first client connects and requests video. you are sending him stream. second client comes and ask for the same video and you are telling him: fuck off, go ask first peer 1.2.3.4, he already have it and he will give it to you... of course in great simplification

this is called P2P, and it will save you a loooooot of monthly bandwidth and lower requirements about your peek throughput in your prime time... so it will lower your CDN bills

disadvantages: higher development costs and higher requirements about client connections (but in these days most clients on fiber/5G will not be even aware of additional few Mbps outgoing traffic, and for especially network constrained clients i.e. mobile with poor coverage you could implement dynamic fallback to classic dedicated connection)

this technology really exists and works. example open source implementation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerTube
https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube

ps. do not forget, that 10% of your future savings when you implement this technology is going to my pocket

afn

@ِAndrews , thanks for the suggestion.

As a matter of fact, I was looking into it already, and suggested it to the person I am running this website for. He didn't fancy the idea, because most of his visitors are from countries with very slow internet and/or with limited amount of traffic per month. Although, I think their connections being "slow" (20-40mbps) won't be a problem when "nodes" are nearby and with the same local ISP.

It will require some time to adapt the current website to use such a service, but it still remains a great idea that we are considering it.

@Andrews said: ps. do not forget, that 10% of your future savings when you implement this technology is going to my pocket

Sure thing