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  1. I have a Social Networking site for a niche market

  2. I need members to be able to view and upload content

  3. My members content is copyrighted therefore in no way can the content be available to the public

  4. Due to the copyright issues no member can copy and embed the content, to other online sources

  5. My bandwidth for my current website is a maximum of 250 gig and no way can my 12,000 members utilise my own bandwidth whithout crashing or slow loads etc.

I hope I can get some kind of response from anyone that can give me some information. Hopefully some one has experience in do what I have in mind. And can direct me to the best alternatives I can consider.

Thanks

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Are you running into bandwidth-related issues already, or are you trying to pre-empt a problem? You mention a 250Gb data limit, which I presume is monthly, and in the same sentence you mention crashing/slow loading. The two are not related. One is volume of data which is going to depend on how many videos are served by your website, and slow loading is dependent on data throughput which in a datacenter is not normally an issue. Concurrently serving multiple videos may be an issue but again that is down to the volume of data you will be serving per webserver. – edralph Apr 27 '11 at 15:49
yea sorry about the mumbled typo, my words were thrown down in a rush to get other things done. Currently there are no video data transfers what so ever. – Jodi W Von Oettingen Apr 27 '11 at 21:36
You can find better answers at serverfault.com – Ross Apr 28 '11 at 6:36

4 Answers

up vote 3 down vote

S3 is probably the best bet for you because you'll want customers to upload directly to your storage service, i.e., not to your servers within your bandwidth cap and then onto a CDN. And, you can run S3 with a CDN, theirs or any other with customer origin support. Just using a CDN would be problematic since it would require you to upload your content directly to them or source it from your origin, leading you to your bandwidth problems.

Once you've settled on storage: transloadit.com is a great way to get the files uploaded and sublimevideo.net for the other direction, i.e., playing. I use and really like both products. I also use a mixture of S3 and EdgeCast via GoGrid with customer uploads going to the former and served via EdgeCast's customer origin and company videos uploaded manually to EdgeCast's own storage and served from there.

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NICE !!! Thanks, I'd have to say this is the best post reply yet. Thank you very much. I just came across Amazon cloud front (as a CDN) so might just be possible to use huh ? I'll assume most of their soft/hard ware is streamlined to be as compatible as possible with any add ons they create. Cross my fingers and thanks for the info very informative. – Jodi W Von Oettingen Apr 27 '11 at 21:44
Glad to help and yes, CloudFront is an option for S3, however there's (oddly) no price break for connecting the two, i.e., customers pay for fetches from an S3 origin just as with a non (unlike, e.g., transfers between two EC2 instances in one AZ.) Nor would there be a technical advantage; a cache miss from Akamai leading to an origin fetch is going to behave the same as with CloudFront (though the latter has odd purge policies that could, in theory, make misses pretty common for low-use content.) – Yuri Gadow Apr 27 '11 at 23:00
Just a rehash on your original post. You mention all 4 services eg Amazon S3, transloadit, sublime and Edgecast are you saying that this is the set up that you to run your entire show ? Also could you enlighten me on the amount of people that upload and view (on average) at the same time ? This can help me with an understanding of the traffic that you are getting and how good the services are (smooth/fast) Thanks – Jodi W Von Oettingen Apr 28 '11 at 0:02
Yes, I've used all those together in a system. But you would need only Amazon S3 to meet the goals in your question. Adding a CDN on top could give a boost but is probably not something to start with with a user base of 12K, very easy to add later on when needed. TransloadIt is a nice, S3 and Rackspace, compatible way of making the upload/transcoding process simpler but isn't necessary either. And sublimevideo just one of many players. As for capacity, I've seen several hundred simultaneous transfers move TB's of data with S3 and I seriously doubt it even considered interesting at AWS. – Yuri Gadow Apr 28 '11 at 4:11
Ran out of space, but just wanted to finish by saying that AWS and the CDN are really the only constraints (transloadit runs in AWS and sublime doesn't move any data, it's just a really nice CDN hosted player.) So unless one's needs scale past AWS and/or EdgeCast/Akamai/whatever, i.e., get really really large, it's not worth spending cycles on. – Yuri Gadow Apr 28 '11 at 4:18
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up vote 2 down vote

Have a look at Amazon's S3 service. Its the best non-public alternative to hosting content like video without burdening your current host with the bandwidth and requests.

With S3 you will have to alter whatever script you're currently using to upload/download the content into your S3 account. Once its there you pay for the bandwidth, space used and how often your users will request that specific content.

This will cost you more per month. You only pay for what you use. Its the smallest risk you can take vs buying a bigger server or possibly in your case a server farm.

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cheers, I have been getting the same advice from the web developers I've been approaching. I will look into them soon as Im trying to get a feeler on all options before I hit the road to rags or riches. Much appreciated. – Jodi W Von Oettingen Apr 27 '11 at 7:05
Yes, absolutely the content distribution networks are a good idea. They are usually cheap and a great for hosting static content (videos, audios and such) – occultsearcher Apr 27 '11 at 7:10
up vote 1 down vote

Check out Wistia. We have used them as one of the platforms for our Pixability video marketing platform for years.

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great thanks, I stumbled across them earlier today and sent them off a msg to see if they can comply with my needs. I am wondering though (I wrote this in the email) can my members use their utility on my own web site ? Doing this cuts the need for them to add another login as they'll be required to use my service and wistias if they cant use the utility in my web site. – Jodi W Von Oettingen Apr 27 '11 at 7:01
We are using their API to integrate into our platform. It is a very decent and flexible platform. – Apollo Sinkevicius Apr 27 '11 at 15:21
nice and again thanks wistia has contacted me, now I just need to find the time to do the same back lol cheers again. – Jodi W Von Oettingen Apr 27 '11 at 21:38
up vote 0 down vote

Ah - no way? I need a car that runs races but does not need any fuel.

You need editing and not be public - no hosting side like youtube.

You dont want to invest into bandwidth and resources - no private hosting.

= no hosting at all.

= not possible.

Sorry, no magic wand here.

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lol nice reply but doesnt answer my question. Im not after a magic wand as I have the funds, Im just after good decent alternatives and something thats not going to cost me an arm and a leg learning how to pull rabbits out of hats. – Jodi W Von Oettingen Apr 27 '11 at 6:59
Then you still have a problem. YOu need to self host. Find a decent host - bandwidth gets cheaper the more you take. And you need to decide an infrastducture for streaming. I personally like IIS / Silverlight.. happens to be free, Flash is EXPENSIVE. – NetTecture Apr 27 '11 at 7:40
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Thanks for the input. I do have to say that in reality I dont have to self host so to speak. I have a website allready, all I need is to embed a player and utilise amazon S3. Hosting is outsourced and so is video data. – Jodi W Von Oettingen Apr 27 '11 at 9:06
Yeah. S3, though, is more expensive than most hosters AND does not really handle streaming efficiently to my knowledge. – NetTecture Apr 27 '11 at 10:54
fair call, but I have little options if I want a professional platform to service my clients. To be honest Id rather eat baked beans for 4 years just to be able to get my vision up and running. Then after that all works, I can start having caviar and champs lol. – Jodi W Von Oettingen Apr 28 '11 at 0:52

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