Quote:
Originally Posted by megapower
if you go with a CDN you only need one origin Server that store your videos (in case CDN pull) or to upload the directly to CDN... and yes the CDN way is easier to handle BUT it's not cheap in every case...
make the calc... better CDN's asking around $30 - $60/TB we operate a medium tube site it comsumes near 1.5PB monthly means the CDN solution would cost us $45K.... we have a deploy of around 20 dedicated servers that cost us $6K (we could handle 3PB+) + 60 hrs monthly for server management (we have a lot fully automated).
on end it depends how much you want to stay in your pocket..... :-)
|
As he says CDN can be super expensive, going with bunch of small inexpensive servers can be way cheaper.
Another thing to consider is that plenty of companies will give you unmetered server on a 100mbps line, and 100mbps for a video server is not bad if you are using several servers to spread the load. Several unmetered servers like that can be the cheapest option. As your site expands you add more server or upgrade to 1gbps lines.
Managing can be very easy and set on almost full automation - mirrors can be synced with something like rsync on linux and your tube site can automatically choose a server from a pool to which to upload, so as far as you are concerned it all works as if you have one server. another cool benefit is that you can set a database replication making all streaming servers have replica of you database and have the writing on your main sever and the reading from the replicas on the video servers, spreading the load even further, not to mention real time backups of your database, after crash you virtually have no loss at all and you can switch one of the clones as main database while fixing the original one.
It can take some time to tune an setup it all but once it's up it can be very easy to maintain.
You can't exactly calculate how much bandwidth or speed you need before you start but as far as peed goes for example if the videos you have are on avereage 900kbps video bitrate and 128kbps audio bitrate that means that one visitor watching a video on your tube requires ~1mbps so one 100mbps server will let you server around 100 people watching simultaneously, if more people start watching they will have to pause for buffering. You can also take into account that if 100 people watch for 10 minutes that 600 mbits per person 60 000mbits for all 100 now 600 / 8 = 7500MB of bandwidth for 100 people watching your videos for 10 min (if you are very traficated 10TB bandwidth is next to nothing). I will reccomend start with 100mbps unmetered servers, once you run it for a while you will have a better idea of how much you need on average and then you can look into other options