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Censorship is really only an issue if you expect to monetize your videos. Self hosting content has always been an option if you don't need a platform that enab
by LinuxBender 5y ago
Censorship is really only an issue if you expect to monetize your videos. Self hosting content has always been an option if you don't need a platform that enables easy monetization. At least that is the feedback I have received from many of the youtubers that I suggested just building their own site.
- reginold 5y agoThat's helpful context. I'm happy to support an open platform that helps creators monetize. For me however, I just need a place to serve videos from.
- LinuxBender 5y agoWell along the lines of h2odragon's comment, you would have to estimate your user-base and calculate what hosting providers can give you the bandwidth you need, or find a CDN that can cache your videos but those get expensive quickly. If you have a small user-base, then just about any VPS provider will do.
- reginold 5y agoBut I'm lazyyyyyyyy come on ;) How much does it cost to host 100 videos that get 1,000 views total per month. $1/month? While I imagine I could set this up, I want easy to use, censorship resistant video hosting for others.
- LinuxBender 5y agovideo hosting for others Well there's the rub. If this was just for you then yes you could get a $1/mo VM, maybe RamNode but there are cheaper ones and just write a script that generates static pages. If you want a platform that others can upload videos to then you are going to need a web application, probably PHP that has a database backend or at least a SQLite DB to map the videos files to the URL's. That could easily put you into the $20 to $40 per month VM. Then you would need something like PeerTube [1] or related software. [1] - https://joinpeertube.org/ https://joinpeertube.org/
- reginold 5y agoAppreciate the thoughtful reply. Ah didn't mean to imply that there's a "platform". I meant more decentralized. A self-hosted YouTube if you will, meaning that creators don't need to do server maintenance and navigate folders, but can simply click upload and post a video to their site. May be beyond the scope of existing tools, but intuitively seems doable.