Looking for bandwidth solution for tube site.. thx
 

I am in the process of setting up a tube site. All our content will be bought/made until we have users uploading their own content. I already got a few producers that will be letting me use their content.

I've been doing some research and overwhelmed with the possibilities. I'm debating how I want to do the hosting of the website/videos.

Would it be better to host the videos from a provider? For example amazon? Or should I have the videos directly on the same server as the site. Would love your suggestions on how you would do this.

something that can easily be adjusted to increased traffic and is reliable.

Thanks in advance

MaxCDN.com will solve your issue with competitive rates.

Thanks i'm checking them out now. But they don't host my actual data. Do you have any solutions that would work best with hosting my tube site/videos.

Thanks mate

reflected
mojohost
cdn12
leaseweb
nationalnet
webair
isprime


check their rates, some are better for small sites, some better for large ones...

;)

You can use multiple dedicated servers for bandwidth balancing. MaxCDN is also a solution, they will sync your videos to their servers and after that the videos are streaming from CDN.

Would you guys recommend using amazon or other 3rd party hosts for hosting the videos or would it be better to just host them directly through the same company hosting my website? So host my site and videos from the same company and then use MaxCDN to make the site faster?

We can set you up on a dedicated server along with our CDN services for your content delivery. Send an email over to [email protected] and I'll get you some competitive rates!

How much bandwidth can i expect to need montly with let's say 5k daily visitors to a tube site? All the videos will be hosted from my server

I would recommend using one server for your site and multiple small inexpensive servers for streaming the videos, this will balance the load and if you mirror each streaming server you spread the load even more and have a piece of mind as you will have an online backup, if one server goes down or the data is corrupted the second is still running preventing downtime and data loss.

Using this kind of setup means that to have lets say 500GB storage you need at least two different servers each 500GB from two different data centers and have them in sync (can be from the same but reliability is not that good, if lets say the connection to the data center is overloaded both servers will be unreachable); you can also have one server in US and its mirror in EU for example.

This spreads the load for this 500GB of videos on both servers and if you need more space you just add more server pairs, if you need more load or backups you add more mirrors; Imagine you have 2tb of videos so you get four server pairs (500gb each server) that means that the videos are streaming from 8 different servers and even if a pair of servers goes down only 1/4 of your videos are not working and not your entire site

@blinki bill
Would a CDN also solve that issue? Instead of having a bunch of servers hosting the videos? Seems like it would be a lot of work to manage all of those.

Dont do it man. You are going to waste money because your tube won't make you anything.

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..... :-)

We have a few tubes, they don't do a huge amount of revenue, so they don't get a TON of attention compared to other projects, but one thing I will say. As long as you get a decent rate on BW, you will be ok on that front. Traffic means higher BW bills, but it also means higher revenue....they rise and fall together (assuming you are monitoring the traffic well). Thats easy to figure out.

Its storage thats the silent killer. We own a TON of content and put it up as fast as we could on the CDN. Long before any real traffic had built up. BUT in order to build traffic, you need all that content. I guess its a catch 22.

Again, Tubes are not really my business and we sort of let them ride on auto pilot. If you are good at other things I would advise AGAINST it. To do it right gets expensive and the chances of having them ever blow up to any much beyond break even is a REAL long shot....

2c

edit: One thing I would remember to do...clean out your DB. Our storage bills were getting NUTS because we have clowns uploading huge vids to promote their programs and they would have under 50 views. After its been up awhile, run through, look at the large files that are not getting ANY traction and clip m'. I think we ended up bringing our bills down by 5k a month just cleaning out a lot of that crap

ouchy... :Oh crap

how much traffic are you seeing weekly on average? I have other projects I am making decent money with but had 2 partners contact me about setting up this project since they know I've done a lot of site building in the past.
Should I tell them to move on and put their money elsewhere? They seem pretty fixed on launching this tube site and have big hopes. It does have it's own twist that I haven't seen anywhere else before

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

also you can start with just one or two server pairs and as your site popularity or storage requirements grow you add more servers.

We have cdn , but costs more than the usual traffic
and we can offer good prices on the traffic to the server

Store all your videos on Amazon S3 in a bucket. Then use Amazon CloudFront for CDN of those S3 videos.

For the application server itself, split that up into a few small servers, DB server, Cache server, and application server... If you need load balancing then get a load balancing server, and scale up as many application servers as needed to spread the load from the load balancing server.

You can probably hit about 3 application servers comfortably before you need to then start scaling your DB server into a master / slave setup.

By the time any of that is needed, you should be handling a fuck bucket of traffic. :thumbsup

i would start with 1 server and scale it up from there if needed.

really depends on your budget tho.

Well this is quite cost ineffective for a start, 3 servers, amazon storage for the videos and CDN on top of that... also slight problem with this setup is - three servers one for application, one for cache and one for db, if the db or application servers go down there goes your entire site, your videos will be fine and streaming just users won't be able to reach them...I mean you go to all this trouble to make a complicated setup and is not even fool proof; this will be way better if you have 4-5 servers with one balancing server two application servers and one or two db server (where one of the application servers can also double as backup db sever if you have just one db server), 1-2 more servers but at least one server won't bring the whole thing down (like christmas lights one goes and all the rest on the chain stop too)

My point however is that for start he can just have three servers, one good powerful server for application and db, and two streaming servers, no separate video storage and cdn on top of that. By the time this setup can not handle the load he should be making enough revenue from the traffic to expand and trow more servers into the mix.

Obviously this will also be better with two main servers and two streaming servers with a simple dns load balancing and db sync instead of replication, so that if one of the main servers is down the other can take over and still gives you just 4 servers to start with nothing on top of that
Having the streaming servers replicated is also good for backups having standard scheduled backups on those servers is not very good and effective; making scheduled backups of like 1tb of videos... better have if replicated to at least one more server as a backup and since it's there use it as streaming server too.

You can also just start with one server and grow from there, but having three to start with will give you a piece of mind when it comes to backups and bandwidth.

The smart thing to do would be go VPS route and scale the VPS up as needed, never go dedicated server for this stuff. Also I'd rather have my DB server go down and my site still be up with a proper message, than the whole thing go down.

around $10'000 for first 100TB (avg worldwide)
$6'000 for the next 100TB

...show me one mid to large size tube who use amazon and pay this :)

My friend I would recommend you to go with Amerinoc.com hosting with our reference or I am going to hook you up with Matt D. of Amerinoc.com You can use Amerinoc.com Hosting with MaxCDN with no issues.

Well for starters the biggest "tube" on the internet with a whopping 24% of all the internets traffic uses and pays for this.

There's more to this stuff than just bandwidth usage. :2 cents:

Go with Reflected and their CDN option.

I just hotlink all my content from xvideos.

The biggest "tube" on the internet doesn't exactly "use" and "pay" for this stuff the way you and I will have to sign up and pay; If you are that large your company will acquire a cdn company to serve you needs, or have a very special contract agreement; this is worlds apart from where we live in...

anyway we are going down the rabbit hole here;

to the OP:
Since you have a host and you were planning to use that for your site all along, I would suggest three options - a) store your videos there then use cdn; b) get two umetered servers to store and stream the videos from there; c) get one dedicated server and have your entire site and videos there (in case your host is not dedicated);

Check which option works for your budget and start from there, if your project goes well and the big $$$ starts coming in you won't have troubles to expand.

Don't listen to people saying that you won't make anything, it all depends how good you are in it, some people make money from blogs, others from tgp's... and yes some people make money from tubes.

You can't make money on the internet. Best idea is to give up without trying.

:thumbsup

Netflix has said countless times how they use Amazon Web Services. Not to mention Reddit does too.

I guarantee if you're pushing over 100TB of bandwidth on your videos, Amazon is going to be your cheapest route. :2 cents:

I'm sure random fucking Internet guy has the some bargaining power as google and Netflix

Just go get a generic $400 a month 100mbps server and go from there. Most likely you'll never make it past that

:1orglaugh

it won't all fit

I don't know you, your skills or the "twist", but I'll tell you this. There are some DAM fine SEO guys out there with SHIT TONS of content and unlimited budgets that have launched thousands and thousands of tubes over the last few years and I can't think of one thats gone on to the size of the original big boys. The days of having any one blow up are over (or at least a BIG, BIG long shot) Id say a 100,000 to one is not being pessimistic.

Again, its not my forte. Id guess if the plan is to launch a large network of niche tubes you might stand a better chance of making some kind of profit, but if you are banking on one tube taking off, Id say that if you are an experienced webmaster with other skills..... your time and money are better spent elsewhere.

Valid point my friend. :thumbsup

We can offer you bandwidth prices for 0.50 cents per GB. Come talk to us. We have some of the cheapest around.

this is 50 cents pr mbps

depends on whether ur videos are 5-10 mins or really long ones like 30mins, smaller file sizes u can serve more people same time, bigger size then less people server can handle, also the port is important its easy to over 1gbps and pull the whole server down. thats why people suggest spread them with several smaller servers and use cdn for the contents. its expensive though. but u can't calculate or predict how much ur bandwidth unless u try it. Before thinking about bandwidth, i would first learn how to convert those tube traffic first with smaller project. like setting up a smaller niche tube. I assume u will be using plug in ads like exoclicks and others like the rest of the tube webmasters, and maybe put the sponsor link below ur movie to grab some pps revshare attention, however u should be cautious where the traffic coming from I assume u rely solely on google and other search engine, usually the first few months when ur site is setup, google tends to flood it with poor countries such as indian,indonesian,turkey,russian,thailand etc, depends on how u choose ur keywords and u gotta prepare to convert them, prepare they are bandwith suckers they tend to stay really long time on a site and keep surfing, they are also the group which geo pay is the minimum, very hard to make money off them both ppc or pps or revshare. When u survive the first wave, maybe 6 months after or 1 year, u start seeing really good traffic from better countries thats where u make money. still the payout is good but in order to make real money u need massive traffic. I give u an idea of how much a tube of mine made last month. Uniques u have (assume 50% good countries 50% bad) x 30 days of a month Dived by 1000 then times it by 1.3. so let say u have 50,000 a day,u should be making somewhere $2000. Then u deduct bandwith. Assuming u also use every inch of ur site to put ads and popup and roll up ads to archive a better ctr.

is it easy? i say its easy to grow to few thousansd 50,000 is quite easy but to grow form there to around 400,000 its difficult u need lots of contents, and really good at keyword research and hours of operation to archive, but is possible. like anything in this society, only top 1-5% of people make 6 figures a year, same to adult industry.