Should a tube host content or embed?
 

Curious, what difference does it really make with hosted content, or embedded videos? This is for a tube looking to get as much traffic as possible of course :)

Thanks

you save on bandwidth costs if you use hosted/embeds

If you embed videos, it's most likely that you will have literally tons of broken videos, which is definitely not good for your users. You should host everything yourself if you want the site to last long.

And you can afford it.

What type of money / server are we talking about for hosted content?

around $2 million a month.

I'm an idiot and I have used up to 2 terabytes a day on a smaller one. I'm not sure who the best tube hosts are but I'm sure someone can recommend.

Big tubes like xvideos need 400+ servers.

If you're opening a legal tube, with your content. You shouldn't worry about the space, the only real cost you'll have is bandwidth. For streaming, you need a lot of it. Not for the start though, but as the site grows, you'll need more and more... For the start, it shouldn't spend more than 1TB per month. - And that's just an estimate if you plan on buying the traffic, otherwise it should be very low.

Illegal ones, however, are (kinda) more costy. Most illegal tubes allow their users to upload files that are, let's say up to 100MB. That automatically increases the space usage and the bandwidth usage as well.

Either way, it's costy. Legal tubes require you to have your content (it isn't free) and illegal ones require more space and more bandwidth. Unless you have a good starting budget, don't waste your time.

Depends on how much traffic you have. I could easily hit 100 terabytes this month if I tried. I'm not trying.

I would start with 1TB/day minimum. Also from content provider's point of view it's better if the tube site embeds the videos, so the content provider does the hosting. In that way you can alter the video (add trailers of other vids, ads) and you get a lot of info in your stats (number of views, locations). So for that same reason serious tube sites would prefer to do the hosting themselves probably.

I remember buying ad space on some very popular TPG site a very long time ago, it was only a small banner but that site had so many visitors that my server went nuts and after a few hours I had to ask the owner to load the banner from his site. lol

i agree. shouldn't think of this game unless you have 2 mil X 10 months on hand.

Where would you guys suggest I host it, if I'll be hosting content on my own, and plan to have a very large library of videos?

Thanks

We operate a couple of legal tubes with full scenes and we host all the content on our own servers.

If you have licensed the content, then you can push any sponsor you want, so that's the real advantage of hosting the content on your own.
If you use sponsor provided content, then just burn the sponsor bw and enbed all you can.

also, since you have licensed the content, you can watermark it with your tube URL.

You should encode your videos properly to burn the minimum possible bw while having decent quality. The encoding software and process is very important in this case. We use Sorenson Squeeze to encode our videos in mp4 format at 700 Kbps for 640x480 and 720x568 scenes. It may sound poor quality, but with the proper settings we get the same encoding qualities as encoding the same scene with other encoders at 2000 Kbps. The downside is that with these encoding settings the encoding process takes about twice the time it takes usually, but the resulting file is much smaller.

On the other side, having choosen 700 Kbps is completely deliberated, because some carriers restrict streams to 800 Kbps or 1000 Kbps. That stream speed ensures that your videos will always play regardless of what carriers does your data pass between.

We also created our own CDN that is transparent to our tube software, and is to any other software too. So we could change the tube software without worrying about the content hosting structure. Just tell the tube script that the video is on http://cdn.example.com/videos/dvds/d...cene/video.mp4 and let the cdn deliver the video regardless of the tube software itself.
Also we geolocalized that CDN to ensure that surfers get the fastest video server near their location. For example, surfers from France will get the videos delivered from french servers while surfers in USA will get them delivered from USA located servers. This allows us to hire cheaper servers while achieving better speeds worldwide than with high cost servers at a specific place. No matter how bad are our french servers outside of France, they will deliver data to french surfers faster than anything else placed outside of France... you get the idea I guess.

For the streaming servers we use per stream capped configuration capping the streams at 1000 Kbps. That ensures 100 concurrent streams per 100 Mbit server witholut resting any user download speed. This grants that videos will always play and will not stop at mid download.

A typical tube with around 50k uniques can burn around 200 - 300 Mbit on peak hours with ease.

With this setup, out cost per 1 Gbps geolocalized data pipe is around 1000 - 1500 euro/month. That is 12 servers spread between USA, France, Amsterdam, HongKong, australia and some other places.

We could give you such kind of service if you want.

Good post here. To start hosting your own tube site. You should probably just look for a deal on atleast 100Mbit

Anyone host a tube site on 100tb.com? 200 bucks a month seem very cheap.

Anyone have specific suggestions on a host? Where do most of the big tubes host their sites?

dreamhost, hostgator, webair.

I was told to use Naked Hosting and they quoted me a custom dedicated with 100 TB for $390 per month. I cannot say with certainty that this is a good price, host, etc.

Trolling is one thing but why would you do this to someone?

big sites host at isprime , choopa and at few others.,

Any other suggestions for hosting?
And out of curiosity, is xhamster fully licensed content? Noticed their "upload" feature isn't live, so it seems so? What are the biggest legal tubes right now? Just curious to see the difference in traffic.

Thanks

Tubes are so three years ago. Find another bandwagon to jump on, because you ain't competing with the tube boys.

Those days are long gone; just like TGPs, MGPs, AVS', and blogs. Don't even waste one second of thought on a tube site unless you can compete with Manwin.

And you can't.

If you're going to go niche, there's no point incurring the bandwidth needed to run a tube site. No siree, Bob!