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> Deploy to Heroku They have a soft limit of 2TB traffic/month, so you're probably not gonna get very far on that platform. I run a very high traffic site on

> Deploy to Heroku They have a soft limit of 2TB traffic/month, so you're probably not gonna get very far on that platform. I run a very high traffic site on a hobby budget and my experience is that you're probably not gonna get around shopping for dedicated servers. That is if you want 500TB - 1PB of traffic per month to be in any way affordable. Forget AWS, Heroku and all that stuff. They're roughly twenty times (literally) more expensive.

js4ever 7y ago
Hetzner have true unlimited bandwidth on their dedicated servers :)
- kirstenbirgit 7y ago
  Nothing is unlimited.
  - arghwhat 7y ago
    Yeah, "unrestricted" is a better term here.
  - hydgv 7y ago
    If something is not unlimited in theory, but it is unlimited in practice, then it is unlimited.
    - mayeaux 7y ago
      The amount of electricity on Earth is not unlimited so at the end of the day there is a literal limit to the amount of data that can be transferred but for the purposes of advertising the product it's fair to describe the bandwidth as unlimited since what we're trying to do is inform the customer so they can make a purchasing decision :)
  - fyp 7y ago
    In theory if you can completely saturate the 1 gbit link for a whole month it's 300TB/month
    - m00dy 7y ago
      nice catch
hydgv 7y ago
Why is it a "soft limit"? Are you allowed to go over it under certain circumstances?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
stareatgoats 7y ago
Do you have a dedicated server provider you can recommend?
- capableweb 7y ago
  Hetzner offers dedicated servers that basically have unrestricted traffic amounts. You can see the pricing here: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver This is what they write about their "unlimited traffic": > Traffic usage is unlimited and free of charge. Please note that our unlimited traffic policy does not apply to servers that have the 10G uplink addon.
  - continuations 7y ago
    Would Hetzner be a good choice for hosting a site with mostly US-based visitors? If I got a 1Gbps Hetzner server would I be able to serve 1Gbps to the US?
    - structural 7y ago
      Hetzner is about 100ms from the US east coast, which is doable. Closer to 200-225ms from the US west coast, which takes quite a bit more effort to deliver a good user experience. You'd probably want a secondary west coast datacenter/CDN. That said, architecting your application so that all the small, latency-sensitive data was served from a CDN and all the bulk data was served from Hetzner would be a good/affordable option.
    - chmod775 7y ago
      I have 3 Hetzner "1 Gbps" servers in my fleet right now, and my experience is that you're only going to get about 50% of that bandwidth reliably to any place in the world (I suspect they secretly capped me, considering how exactly each server keeps hovering around that number). They're still a good deal at that price point though. A server provider that delivered on exactly what they're selling has been online.net, though they ramped up their prices recently. When they sell you X Mbit/s amount of "premium" bandwidth, you're always going to get at least that. If you exceed it a lot they'll cap you to exactly that though. I used to have 8 dedicated servers with them at ~30 Euro/month (excl. taxes) each for a total of ~3Gbit/s bandwidth. I've had some complaints about download speeds by users from NA when using German-based providers and significantly less complaints when using servers in France (i.e. online.net) or elsewhere west of Germany. I cap download speeds at 3MB/s per user anyways though. Though beggars can't be choosers. I buy any cheap bandwidth offers I see. Another thing to look out for if you're planning to saturate 1Ggbit/s is using SSDs and/or a good amount (>=32GB) of RAM. You'll probably not manage to do that if you have 1TB worth of files on a HDD and 8GB RAM for your OS's page cache. If you're planning to use SSL to serve stuff make sure your CPU isn't super old or an Intel Atom or something (I tried having a fleet of a lot of mini dedis once...). I should write a blog post about all this and more at some point. Maybe next year?
mayeaux 7y ago
Thanks for the suggestion. Currently I am just running the hosting off of a Backblaze B2 account. It's still super cheap right now, if it ever gets expensive I will definitely look into a VPS or Dedicated Server, but hopefully there will be a pretty solid community around the NodeTube source at that point.
runarberg 7y ago
Would it be possible to offload the majority of the traffic using some P2P protocol for videos, like webRTC?
- mayeaux 7y ago
  You could use WebTorrent which is P2P in the browser, the issue is exposing people's public IP addresses which I really don't like, so I would never run it in prod unless it was a user opt-in, but not a big priority for me at the moment.
  - Fr33maan 7y ago
    And then it would become peertube https://joinpeertube.org https://joinpeertube.org
JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
You could put a CDN in front of the static content (the videos are likely 99% of YouTube's bandwidth), and you could use Heroku for serving the few kilobytes of HTML.
- chmod775 7y ago
  > You could put a CDN in front of the static content Most are still way more expensive than dedicated server traffic and "fixed price" CDNs like Cloudflare are going to give you the boot if you serve >100TB on their 20 bucks plan and/or a lot of larger files.
mayeaux 7y ago
Heroku has an ephemeral filesystem I'm not sure how you would really serve content from Heroku. Better is to use a service like BackBlaze to host. 2000 GB -> 20$/month using their service.

js4ever 7y ago

Hetzner have true unlimited bandwidth on their dedicated servers :)

kirstenbirgit 7y ago
Nothing is unlimited.
- arghwhat 7y ago
  Yeah, "unrestricted" is a better term here.
- hydgv 7y ago
  If something is not unlimited in theory, but it is unlimited in practice, then it is unlimited.
  - mayeaux 7y ago
    The amount of electricity on Earth is not unlimited so at the end of the day there is a literal limit to the amount of data that can be transferred but for the purposes of advertising the product it's fair to describe the bandwidth as unlimited since what we're trying to do is inform the customer so they can make a purchasing decision :)
- fyp 7y ago
  In theory if you can completely saturate the 1 gbit link for a whole month it's 300TB/month
  - m00dy 7y ago
    nice catch

hydgv 7y ago

Why is it a "soft limit"? Are you allowed to go over it under certain circumstances?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

stareatgoats 7y ago

Do you have a dedicated server provider you can recommend?

capableweb 7y ago
Hetzner offers dedicated servers that basically have unrestricted traffic amounts. You can see the pricing here: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver This is what they write about their "unlimited traffic": > Traffic usage is unlimited and free of charge. Please note that our unlimited traffic policy does not apply to servers that have the 10G uplink addon.
- continuations 7y ago
  Would Hetzner be a good choice for hosting a site with mostly US-based visitors? If I got a 1Gbps Hetzner server would I be able to serve 1Gbps to the US?
  - structural 7y ago
    Hetzner is about 100ms from the US east coast, which is doable. Closer to 200-225ms from the US west coast, which takes quite a bit more effort to deliver a good user experience. You'd probably want a secondary west coast datacenter/CDN. That said, architecting your application so that all the small, latency-sensitive data was served from a CDN and all the bulk data was served from Hetzner would be a good/affordable option.
  - chmod775 7y ago
    I have 3 Hetzner "1 Gbps" servers in my fleet right now, and my experience is that you're only going to get about 50% of that bandwidth reliably to any place in the world (I suspect they secretly capped me, considering how exactly each server keeps hovering around that number). They're still a good deal at that price point though. A server provider that delivered on exactly what they're selling has been online.net, though they ramped up their prices recently. When they sell you X Mbit/s amount of "premium" bandwidth, you're always going to get at least that. If you exceed it a lot they'll cap you to exactly that though. I used to have 8 dedicated servers with them at ~30 Euro/month (excl. taxes) each for a total of ~3Gbit/s bandwidth. I've had some complaints about download speeds by users from NA when using German-based providers and significantly less complaints when using servers in France (i.e. online.net) or elsewhere west of Germany. I cap download speeds at 3MB/s per user anyways though. Though beggars can't be choosers. I buy any cheap bandwidth offers I see. Another thing to look out for if you're planning to saturate 1Ggbit/s is using SSDs and/or a good amount (>=32GB) of RAM. You'll probably not manage to do that if you have 1TB worth of files on a HDD and 8GB RAM for your OS's page cache. If you're planning to use SSL to serve stuff make sure your CPU isn't super old or an Intel Atom or something (I tried having a fleet of a lot of mini dedis once...). I should write a blog post about all this and more at some point. Maybe next year?

mayeaux 7y ago

Thanks for the suggestion. Currently I am just running the hosting off of a Backblaze B2 account. It's still super cheap right now, if it ever gets expensive I will definitely look into a VPS or Dedicated Server, but hopefully there will be a pretty solid community around the NodeTube source at that point.

runarberg 7y ago

Would it be possible to offload the majority of the traffic using some P2P protocol for videos, like webRTC?

mayeaux 7y ago
You could use WebTorrent which is P2P in the browser, the issue is exposing people's public IP addresses which I really don't like, so I would never run it in prod unless it was a user opt-in, but not a big priority for me at the moment.
- Fr33maan 7y ago
  And then it would become peertube https://joinpeertube.org https://joinpeertube.org

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago

You could put a CDN in front of the static content (the videos are likely 99% of YouTube's bandwidth), and you could use Heroku for serving the few kilobytes of HTML.

chmod775 7y ago
> You could put a CDN in front of the static content Most are still way more expensive than dedicated server traffic and "fixed price" CDNs like Cloudflare are going to give you the boot if you serve >100TB on their 20 bucks plan and/or a lot of larger files.

mayeaux 7y ago

Heroku has an ephemeral filesystem I'm not sure how you would really serve content from Heroku. Better is to use a service like BackBlaze to host. 2000 GB -> 20$/month using their service.