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I use a $20/month VPS with unlimited, unmetered 10gbit bandwidth (no, I do not use outrageously priced "public clouds"). I have no troubles serving 4K video (w

by dannyw 6y ago

I use a $20/month VPS with unlimited, unmetered 10gbit bandwidth (no, I do not use outrageously priced "public clouds"). I have no troubles serving 4K video (with a 720p low-bitrate transcode) with a simple <video> tag, and I do not pay for bandwidth. This month, I've egressed 11TB for $20, and I could easily triple that at no additional cost. I can stream 4K without buffering fine and I've never had a user complain, so it works.

red0point 6y ago
May I ask from which provider you are getting this VPS? 20USD for unlimited 10Gbit/s bandwidth sounds a bit too good to be true.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dannyw 6y ago
  I was able to get a custom 10gbit unmetered plan from Virmach a couple years ago. Definitely real, and I've been pulling double-digit-TB egress for months without issue. I see on their website you can upgrade to 10gbit metered for an extra $2/month but I don't know what they'd charge for the unmetered options now. There are lots and lots of providers if you are happy with 1gbit unmetered though: I'm a happy customer of BuyVM (starting from less than $2 a month!) and Scaleway (bandwidth depends on your plan). If you are happy to spend a bit more for your own dedicated box, OVH, Hertzner, Online.net are great options. All of them offer unmetered BW I believe.
  - Blaine0002 6y ago
    unfortunately after doing research into all of those, their terms of service allows them to charge more or cancel your account after what they consider to be 'excessive' bandwidth usage, so i wouldnt consider them truly unlimited or unmetered. It doesnt seem virmach offers unmetered anymore, but I may reach out to them
    - GOATS- 6y ago
      Hosts such as Leaseweb, nForce or Worldstream have 100TB+ plans you can purchase. If you're willing to spend quite a bit, they also offer truly unmetered plans. I've personally used all three of them, but never used more than 100TB a month.
      - Blaine0002 6y ago
        Awesome, thank you for this. will check them out.
    - StavrosK 6y ago
      I asked Hetzner specifically whether they'd have a problem if I saturated my dedicated Gb connection for a month, and they said no, it's mine to saturate. I don't remember if this is on a dedicated box or a VPS, but IIRC it was dedicated and the VPS has a 3 TB/mo limit.
gravypod 6y ago
The benifit of a cloud/managed cdn is in it's availability, latency, and peering agreements. Your vps is perfectly fine so long as you're not serving traffic in China, India, etc. If you need to push data globally, need to handle very peaky traffic above the throughput of one machine, or need to have 99.9999% uptime, a cdn will look attractive.
- ethanwillis 6y ago
  Outsourcing your infrastructure to others is an existential risk. CDNs and such don't look so good to a lot of people because there's something to be said about the nature and value of doing it yourself. The nature being that no one cares about you more than you An analog for me is car repair. I could take my car in to get oil changes, have brakes serviced, etc. etc. Disregarding the money I save the reason I don't use those services is because those technicians and companies do not care about the quality of their work on my property as much as I do. As an example, I was feeling too lazy to do a radiator replacement myself and so I took it to a big shop. Terrible mistake, when I got the car back they'd unplugged some of the sparkplug wires and forgot to plug one back in. There's no way they didn't notice the rough idling when moving it out of the bay. Even worse they wanted to say nothing was wrong until I had them pop the hood and pointed out the spark plug boot just sitting there. Edit: To expand on this, the answer isn't buy a CDN solution. The answer is make CDN solutions so easy to implement that anyone can setup their own with their own hardware hosted in colos around the world.
  - tpetry 6y ago
    Sorry but this absolute nonsense. In reality nobody does care how you host your website snd files, the only thing users care for is the content is always available and fast.
    - ethanwillis 6y ago
      I think you're misunderstanding. I'm not saying users care about infrastructure risk. I'm saying developers do, or at least arguing that they SHOULD
dspillett 6y ago
> I have no troubles serving 4K > I could easily > I can stream 4K without... Of course that depends on your users too. You have one connection point to the wider Internet and differing peering arrangements might many some (or possibly many) can't access your resources that fast even if you can serve them that fast as far as your provider's egress points. Those outrageously priced public clouds and CDNs likely have greater global peering arrangements that will vastly best a cheap VPS for a lot of uses. They also offer availability guarantees, bandwidth guarantees that a cheap VPS will never offer (that 10gbit bandwidth will be "up to" on a shared pipe), and other potentially significant considerations. > I've never had a user complain, so it works. Of course if all your users are in topologically convenient locations so they can pull content from that one VPS at a good rate, you don't see sufficient concurrent access (or don't at times other users of the providers' bandwidth are) such that the lack of bandwidth guarantees are not an issue, then you do have the right tool for your job. But this is far from a one-size-fits-all business. (though of course if a user just goes elsewhere without complaining, how would you know?)
fsagx 6y ago
Who is the provider and how long have you been with them? My go-to low priced VPS host has been a little flakey lately.
Hamuko 6y ago
I have a dedicated 25 EUR/month server from Hetzner that is used for serving video content. It's a pretty good solution, but not perfect. I have heard that some people have trouble watching content, most likely due to peering between Germany and the US. There's no transcoding options for the end-users since I'm already hosting 1 TB of content and there's not really room to keep different versions. Mostly not a big deal for my users but it's probably not helping with the connectivity issues. I've considered other options but there's really nothing that can beat this setup when it comes to price performance. Serving a terabyte of content for 25 euro a month is pretty unbeatable. I recently had a 24 hours period where the server pushed out like 1.06 TB of traffic. This kind of bandwidth would be killing my wallet otherwise. And since this is a non-profit project, I'm eating all of the costs.

by dannyw 6y ago

red0point 6y ago

May I ask from which provider you are getting this VPS? 20USD for unlimited 10Gbit/s bandwidth sounds a bit too good to be true.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dannyw 6y ago
I was able to get a custom 10gbit unmetered plan from Virmach a couple years ago. Definitely real, and I've been pulling double-digit-TB egress for months without issue. I see on their website you can upgrade to 10gbit metered for an extra $2/month but I don't know what they'd charge for the unmetered options now. There are lots and lots of providers if you are happy with 1gbit unmetered though: I'm a happy customer of BuyVM (starting from less than $2 a month!) and Scaleway (bandwidth depends on your plan). If you are happy to spend a bit more for your own dedicated box, OVH, Hertzner, Online.net are great options. All of them offer unmetered BW I believe.
- Blaine0002 6y ago
  unfortunately after doing research into all of those, their terms of service allows them to charge more or cancel your account after what they consider to be 'excessive' bandwidth usage, so i wouldnt consider them truly unlimited or unmetered. It doesnt seem virmach offers unmetered anymore, but I may reach out to them
  - GOATS- 6y ago
    Hosts such as Leaseweb, nForce or Worldstream have 100TB+ plans you can purchase. If you're willing to spend quite a bit, they also offer truly unmetered plans. I've personally used all three of them, but never used more than 100TB a month.
    - Blaine0002 6y ago
      Awesome, thank you for this. will check them out.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    I asked Hetzner specifically whether they'd have a problem if I saturated my dedicated Gb connection for a month, and they said no, it's mine to saturate. I don't remember if this is on a dedicated box or a VPS, but IIRC it was dedicated and the VPS has a 3 TB/mo limit.

gravypod 6y ago

The benifit of a cloud/managed cdn is in it's availability, latency, and peering agreements. Your vps is perfectly fine so long as you're not serving traffic in China, India, etc. If you need to push data globally, need to handle very peaky traffic above the throughput of one machine, or need to have 99.9999% uptime, a cdn will look attractive.

ethanwillis 6y ago
Outsourcing your infrastructure to others is an existential risk. CDNs and such don't look so good to a lot of people because there's something to be said about the nature and value of doing it yourself. The nature being that no one cares about you more than you An analog for me is car repair. I could take my car in to get oil changes, have brakes serviced, etc. etc. Disregarding the money I save the reason I don't use those services is because those technicians and companies do not care about the quality of their work on my property as much as I do. As an example, I was feeling too lazy to do a radiator replacement myself and so I took it to a big shop. Terrible mistake, when I got the car back they'd unplugged some of the sparkplug wires and forgot to plug one back in. There's no way they didn't notice the rough idling when moving it out of the bay. Even worse they wanted to say nothing was wrong until I had them pop the hood and pointed out the spark plug boot just sitting there. Edit: To expand on this, the answer isn't buy a CDN solution. The answer is make CDN solutions so easy to implement that anyone can setup their own with their own hardware hosted in colos around the world.
- tpetry 6y ago
  Sorry but this absolute nonsense. In reality nobody does care how you host your website snd files, the only thing users care for is the content is always available and fast.
  - ethanwillis 6y ago
    I think you're misunderstanding. I'm not saying users care about infrastructure risk. I'm saying developers do, or at least arguing that they SHOULD

dspillett 6y ago

> I have no troubles serving 4K > I could easily > I can stream 4K without... Of course that depends on your users too. You have one connection point to the wider Internet and differing peering arrangements might many some (or possibly many) can't access your resources that fast even if you can serve them that fast as far as your provider's egress points. Those outrageously priced public clouds and CDNs likely have greater global peering arrangements that will vastly best a cheap VPS for a lot of uses. They also offer availability guarantees, bandwidth guarantees that a cheap VPS will never offer (that 10gbit bandwidth will be "up to" on a shared pipe), and other potentially significant considerations. > I've never had a user complain, so it works. Of course if all your users are in topologically convenient locations so they can pull content from that one VPS at a good rate, you don't see sufficient concurrent access (or don't at times other users of the providers' bandwidth are) such that the lack of bandwidth guarantees are not an issue, then you do have the right tool for your job. But this is far from a one-size-fits-all business. (though of course if a user just goes elsewhere without complaining, how would you know?)

fsagx 6y ago

Who is the provider and how long have you been with them? My go-to low priced VPS host has been a little flakey lately.

Hamuko 6y ago

I have a dedicated 25 EUR/month server from Hetzner that is used for serving video content. It's a pretty good solution, but not perfect. I have heard that some people have trouble watching content, most likely due to peering between Germany and the US. There's no transcoding options for the end-users since I'm already hosting 1 TB of content and there's not really room to keep different versions. Mostly not a big deal for my users but it's probably not helping with the connectivity issues. I've considered other options but there's really nothing that can beat this setup when it comes to price performance. Serving a terabyte of content for 25 euro a month is pretty unbeatable. I recently had a 24 hours period where the server pushed out like 1.06 TB of traffic. This kind of bandwidth would be killing my wallet otherwise. And since this is a non-profit project, I'm eating all of the costs.