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Oracle Cloud Always Free vs Budget VPS for Node.js + FFmpeg Streaming?
iamstrangemind
Member
in General
I'm comparing Oracle Cloud Always Free with low cost VPS providers for a Node.js + FFmpeg streaming backend. For those who've run media workloads, what providers have given you the best network performance and uptime?
Comments
Honestly many yearly deals here. Just buy one
Just buy a cheap one, I've tried the Oracle free instances. Even the @DediRock $8.88/year plan does far better than the Oracle free instance.
Not for me. The Oracle AMD has limited disk speeds, but the Arm ones are faster.
Oracle has pretty good network and uptime and free backups. You just need to script the backup with oci cli.
I just setup a YAMS with Oracle for the content downloading and a dedirock 4TB for the storage.
Video streaming? For raw throughput, nothing beats a provider that passes through a GPU for hardware-accelerated encoding. Soon you'll start seeing even VPSes using virtio to expose things like VAAPI even!
Oracle Always Free offers a great 10TB bandwidth allowance, but its current 2-core ARM limit is too weak for FFmpeg, and sustained transcoding will likely trigger an automated account ban. For reliable media streaming without buffering, budget providers offering dedicated CPU threads—like Hetzner's CCX line or Netcup's Root Servers—are your best bet. To completely eliminate egress costs, run your transcoding on one of these dedicated VPS instances and put Cloudflare in front of it to cache the video segments at the edge.
And for now it's 50mbps limit for channel 🥲
Try to encode on a different machine and then serve it from VPS. I don't know of any low budget VPS that would be good for live transcoding
If you download things and watch it from a decent media player, you shouldn't really need to transcode at all. I've only noticed transcoding on hotel limited WiFi on a tablet.
Err, what does "media workloads" actually mean?
I wait for this day...
You can actually do it already with virgl and a very small patch to QEMU.
interesting... I am yet to see a host that exposes this unless you know of one??
Thanks so much
idk, have tried encoding on oracle myself, it's not good. mainly because the always free ampere a1 cores are shared on the arm side, and the amd micro instances are even more limited on vcpu allocation, ffmpeg encode is sustained 100% cpu the whole time which is exactly the pattern their fair use policy flags as abuse on a free tier. even when it doesn't get flagged, sustained load on burstable cores just tanks your actual encode speed
Does that support all features for like a intel igpu? Haven't bothered exploring that at all since sriov does work flawlessly 😅
I doubt it, because it would mean recompiling QEMU each time there's an update, and not using the stable branch.
Just hardware-accelerated video encoding/decoding. And SR-IOV is nice but it doesn't scale to e.g. hundreds of VMs.
Hundreds of vms? I doubt you get anything useful out of that poor igpu past 15 maybe. And thats already a very very optimistic. Dedicated cards, different story. Although reaching 100 is already tough.
Maybe not hundreds, but dozens could still be accelerated. Not at full speed, but still faster than pure software.
Dedicated cards are sometimes worse. Nvidia artificially limits their transcoding to 8 simultaneous streams.