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DIY or use a specialized provider?
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DIY or use a specialized provider?

NickMNickM Member
edited August 2012 in General

Sure, a VPS can be used for just about anything. Hosting your website, audio streaming, video streaming, you name it, you can probably do it. Is this always the best course of action though? If you have to stream video to 50 or 100 people live, should you really use a low end VPS for it, when there are dozens of free streaming providers that can handle it? Chances are, the experience is going to be 10 times better with a provider that specializes in video streaming and it'll be 10 times easier, too.

For example, one of my websites does two four-hour live streams, 4 nights a week, to 100 people each. I could spend a fortune on VPSes just to support that or just use a free live streaming provider that also provides a chat and archives of the streams.

So, what do you guys think? Is there a reason you've chosen (or suggest) one approach over the other?

Comments

  • imagineimagine Member
    edited August 2012

    Well, back in my days of a/v streaming, it was a community project - we looked at the available solutions to us and decided that Mogulus was the right solution.

    To be put simply, though we had the budget for a VPS/server setup to do the same thing, we were dealing with some non-techy members, and the features it had would've taken an age to implement with the server alternatives at the time, and we'd rather spent that time doing other things.

    That said, however, looking back - I probably still would have chosen Mogulus, because it just worked, but it would have been interesting to see what we could've done with our own solution.

    I think the idea that (1) Maintenance wasn't down to us, (2) It was cloud based and redundant, and (3) Free! we couldn't justify the cost in both time and expense of building our own.

    Needless to say, I suppose that if the project was still alive today - I would have probably got fed up of some aspect of Mogulus and built it myself.

  • I've got an army of LEBs -- and a cheap DataShack dedi -- for video streaming.

    The ads inserted with each provider's free product was what pushed me over the edge. Livestream was great until they got obnoxious adverts, Ustream's preroll ads bugged me, and Justin.tv started doing annoying prerolls as well.

    The "new" Livestream's $45/mo option is great -- no viewer hours BS, no ads, but no embedding. Want to embed? $269/mo, and that's only with 3,000 viewer hours and one channel. It only goes up from there. Ustream's Watershed is $49/mo for 500 hours, and $179 for 2,000. Ustream "Pro" is $99/mo for 100 hours, $499/mo for 4,000 hours.

    Counting just the LEBs, they're cheaper than all of the video streaming solutions I've seen. There is no guaranteed quality, but I haven't been let down yet. It's a bit interesting to set up the server software initially, but after doing that it's really easy to just start and stop the servers as needed. The highest viewer count I've hit using the setup is around fifty, and the only consistent complaint is the inability for iDevices to view RTMP streams.

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