4 ms·

When Vimeo realizes your channel is using too much bandwidth

39 points by pjbk 5y ago

teruakohatu 5y ago
I watched the video linked. This person claims: * He has 4,000 videos on his guitar website behind a paywall, paying $400/yr (Business Plan) * His plan offers 5TB of storage, he uses 1.3 TB (from memory). * Vimeo does not give users access to bandwidth stats. * He was told he has exceeded some unpublished threshold for 13 months and his account will be shutdown if it exceeds it again. * He was offered a contract and given 7 days to sign it for $5000/yr and his account would not be shutdown during this period. On the pricing page Vimeo claims unlimited bandwidth for the $50/month Business plan: "Unlimited bandwidth (subject to fair use)" and when you mouseover it, a popup says "Users in the top 1% of monthly bandwidth usage (99% of Vimeo users never reach this threshold), may be charged for excessive usage". So it seems 1% of users are forced into custom contracts that exceed the highest published tier of pricing. I would have expected some additional chargers for exceeding some threshold, not increasing the monthly cost by 13x.
- fb03 5y ago
  We are moving all our services OFF vimeo for this exact same reason. The part you mentioned about stats and info being opaque and then out of nowhere you are blocked out of your account resonates with my experience as well.
  - France_is_bacon 5y ago
    Where are you going to? I was going to use Vimeo starting soon, but now, I don't think so. So what other places exist to post videos? Digital Ocean? https://www.digitalocean.com/solutions/streaming/ https://www.digitalocean.com/solutions/streaming/
    - 8K832d7tNmiQ 5y ago
      If you have a huge traffic with high bandwith, maybe consider using CDN or some S3 service like B2 instead of hosting over video platform.
      - fragmede 5y ago
        But then you have to code up a video platform. Which isn't too bad given the <video> tag, but that becomes yet another thing to manage. Vimeo (and YouTube, if it were amenable to this use case) is a finished product for end users to interact with.
    - fb03 5y ago
      - Custom js player ("soft" hls with videos split as chunks which enables dynamic bandwidth/resolution change) - videos encoded as these chunks in any cdn you find a good deal. I am using Bunny CDN and it's working quite well (but don't use their ftp 'home' storage, host on S3 and serve it from there since their ftp has abysmal upload speeds -- but if it serves you try it tho, their local storage for content is as cheap as 0,01USD/gb in the Falkestein zone)
      - gazby 5y ago
        We also had some issues with Bunny's FTP origin, but that was around availability for serving to the CDN tier. We didn't want to split the origin and CDN, so we switched to Google storage. Vastly more expensive though.
    - celsoazevedo 5y ago
      Cloudflare Stream could be a good solution for some.
    - nathanyz 5y ago
      We have actually been seeing this happen to a lot of people who are now moving over to us. https://swarmify.com https://swarmify.com We provide automatic import from Vimeo and conversion of the embeds as well with just a javascript snippet. And our pricing ends up being about 10-50% of the cost of what Vimeo is trying to push. One of those time where having the right features at the right time has made it easy for people to get out of this Vimeo battle against their top customers.
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  That just sounds like a shakedown of the most successful customers. Why not move to an alternate platform like Rumble (https://rumble.com/register.php https://rumble.com/register.php)? Is there some kind of lock-in aspect I am missing?
  - joshuamorton 5y ago
    Rumble appears to cost $500/mo ($6K/yr) for a similar 5TB of storage and 20TB of bandwidth package.
- France_is_bacon 5y ago
  >On the pricing page Vimeo claims unlimited bandwidth for the $50/month Business plan: I hate, hate, hate it when companies claim this, including mobile phone companies. Unlimited means unlimited. The who "Subject to fair use" is just a bullshit way of trying to say that the usage is actually NOT unlimited. It's like getting a job at a company and they say that they will pay you $500,000 per year. But then they say that the compensation is subject to fair use, and then they start paying you $40,000 per year.
  - Proven 5y ago
    But you surely understand that real "unlimited" plan would have to charge you for the amount of traffic equal to maximum phone download speed times 30 times 86400 and that would make "unlimited" $199/mo and out of reach for 99% of customers? The right and fair way is to bill everyone for how much they use, which is an eternal source of complaints from HN's net neutrality socialists.
twirlock 5y ago
Great market competition going on across the online video manifold.

39 points by pjbk 5y ago

I watched the video linked. This person claims: * He has 4,000 videos on his guitar website behind a paywall, paying $400/yr (Business Plan) * His plan offers 5TB of storage, he uses 1.3 TB (from memory). * Vimeo does not give users access to bandwidth stats. * He was told he has exceeded some unpublished threshold for 13 months and his account will be shutdown if it exceeds it again. * He was offered a contract and given 7 days to sign it for $5000/yr and his account would not be shutdown during this period. On the pricing page Vimeo claims unlimited bandwidth for the $50/month Business plan: "Unlimited bandwidth (subject to fair use)" and when you mouseover it, a popup says "Users in the top 1% of monthly bandwidth usage (99% of Vimeo users never reach this threshold), may be charged for excessive usage". So it seems 1% of users are forced into custom contracts that exceed the highest published tier of pricing. I would have expected some additional chargers for exceeding some threshold, not increasing the monthly cost by 13x.

fb03 5y ago
We are moving all our services OFF vimeo for this exact same reason. The part you mentioned about stats and info being opaque and then out of nowhere you are blocked out of your account resonates with my experience as well.
- France_is_bacon 5y ago
  Where are you going to? I was going to use Vimeo starting soon, but now, I don't think so. So what other places exist to post videos? Digital Ocean? https://www.digitalocean.com/solutions/streaming/ https://www.digitalocean.com/solutions/streaming/
  - 8K832d7tNmiQ 5y ago
    If you have a huge traffic with high bandwith, maybe consider using CDN or some S3 service like B2 instead of hosting over video platform.
    - fragmede 5y ago
      But then you have to code up a video platform. Which isn't too bad given the <video> tag, but that becomes yet another thing to manage. Vimeo (and YouTube, if it were amenable to this use case) is a finished product for end users to interact with.
  - fb03 5y ago
    - Custom js player ("soft" hls with videos split as chunks which enables dynamic bandwidth/resolution change) - videos encoded as these chunks in any cdn you find a good deal. I am using Bunny CDN and it's working quite well (but don't use their ftp 'home' storage, host on S3 and serve it from there since their ftp has abysmal upload speeds -- but if it serves you try it tho, their local storage for content is as cheap as 0,01USD/gb in the Falkestein zone)
    - gazby 5y ago
      We also had some issues with Bunny's FTP origin, but that was around availability for serving to the CDN tier. We didn't want to split the origin and CDN, so we switched to Google storage. Vastly more expensive though.
  - celsoazevedo 5y ago
    Cloudflare Stream could be a good solution for some.
  - nathanyz 5y ago
    We have actually been seeing this happen to a lot of people who are now moving over to us. https://swarmify.com https://swarmify.com We provide automatic import from Vimeo and conversion of the embeds as well with just a javascript snippet. And our pricing ends up being about 10-50% of the cost of what Vimeo is trying to push. One of those time where having the right features at the right time has made it easy for people to get out of this Vimeo battle against their top customers.
throwawaysea 5y ago
That just sounds like a shakedown of the most successful customers. Why not move to an alternate platform like Rumble (https://rumble.com/register.php https://rumble.com/register.php)? Is there some kind of lock-in aspect I am missing?
- joshuamorton 5y ago
  Rumble appears to cost $500/mo ($6K/yr) for a similar 5TB of storage and 20TB of bandwidth package.
France_is_bacon 5y ago
>On the pricing page Vimeo claims unlimited bandwidth for the $50/month Business plan: I hate, hate, hate it when companies claim this, including mobile phone companies. Unlimited means unlimited. The who "Subject to fair use" is just a bullshit way of trying to say that the usage is actually NOT unlimited. It's like getting a job at a company and they say that they will pay you $500,000 per year. But then they say that the compensation is subject to fair use, and then they start paying you $40,000 per year.
- Proven 5y ago
  But you surely understand that real "unlimited" plan would have to charge you for the amount of traffic equal to maximum phone download speed times 30 times 86400 and that would make "unlimited" $199/mo and out of reach for 99% of customers? The right and fair way is to bill everyone for how much they use, which is an eternal source of complaints from HN's net neutrality socialists.

twirlock 5y ago

Great market competition going on across the online video manifold.