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With this amount of views you can just rent a cheap VPS with a few terabytes of included egress traffic, put up a very basic index.html, and stream those videos

by foepys 5y ago

With this amount of views you can just rent a cheap VPS with a few terabytes of included egress traffic, put up a very basic index.html, and stream those videos via the browser's HTML5 video player. This costs about $5 per month, maybe add $5 for more storage. I get that not everybody has the skills to do this and payments are handled by Vimeo but $3500 is outrageous.

dec0dedab0de 5y ago
3500 a year is significantly less than hiring someone to do it for you.
- foepys 5y ago
  Let's not kid ourselves that this requires a full-time position. I bet you can hire some agency to do this for you for a few hundred bucks.
  - robbedpeter 5y ago
    Pricing designed to exploit people who don't know what they don't know, when it boils down to 30 seconds or less of information about vps hosting - that's pretty crappy to do to people. It does create a market opportunity for small shops / agencies. Even charging $500 an hour for an initial setup would be fair, since you can template the server deployments and set up small business video hosting pretty trivially. Really, though, you could follow a one page tutorial using Linode or Digital Ocean and the like, and scale your hosting to their plans. Vimeo is not going to survive long being the "bad guy" in this market. They need a visionary, but they've got conservative plodders.
  - 999900000999 5y ago
    Once you get done with the consulting fees and follow up work, 3500$ a year isn't bad. Vimeo isn't doing this to be mean. If it was easy to do it an affordable manner, I'm a sure one of us techies could whip it up ( a Video hosting service )in about a week or two, but I strongly suspect you'd end up losing money.
- hkt 5y ago
  I suspect not. A VPS on the order of £10/month could do this fairly well, and I've seen managed services options at £50/hour/month. Even assuming half a day to set up standard monitoring services etc, and another to set up someone's choice of FLOSS video hosting and blogging platform of choice. Subsequent years won't have the outlay of the first either.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  I will gladly ftp your video files to a 5 dollar server for a reasonable rate. Dollar a video..
lawl 5y ago
It seems they're using akamai adaptive media delivery. Unfortunately akamai doesn't seem to have pricing on the page. So maybe akamai is just milking them and they're passing the cost on to their customers. Though I do have to wonder about a video hosting "technology platform" that's just selling a thin webinterface on top of akamai. I agree, you can do this on $10 per month yourself if you have the skills and $3500 is ridiculous.
- skuhn 5y ago
  At the scale I presume Vimeo operates at, for US/EU CDN traffic they should be under 1 cent per gigabyte transferred. Perhaps a bit more since it requires more work to obtain competitive pricing from Akamai, and Akamai AMD is a value added service and not just the bulk data CDN.
scruple 5y ago
I built a system that does just this (it's a little bit more complex, of course, but the gist is the same) but for videos that are self-hosted (on our own bare metal servers and data storage) and automatically uploaded from devices in the field. I've never bothered to check costs because they're trivially insignificant for us; We just don't have that many users / devices. It's a niche hobby project that nets us enough money to support itself. I haven't even had to touch any of this infrastructure in literally years. My co-founder occasionally needs to plug a new data drive into the primary and/or back up storage (the server closets are on-premise in his garage) and run an interactive python script to get things configured. Otherwise it all "just works" and maintains itself perfectly well.
manquer 5y ago
Cloudflare stream is 60% of that cost . Vimeo doesn't have CDN network advantage of cloudflare so not it that outrageous. A lot of tech products are as not that much more complex than you say. There are plenty of open source software you could stick into VPS that people pay SaaS service providers with similar features a lot of money for . For someone with the skills it is hard to understand the markup, but those skills are really valuable.

by foepys 5y ago

dec0dedab0de 5y ago

3500 a year is significantly less than hiring someone to do it for you.

foepys 5y ago
Let's not kid ourselves that this requires a full-time position. I bet you can hire some agency to do this for you for a few hundred bucks.
- robbedpeter 5y ago
  Pricing designed to exploit people who don't know what they don't know, when it boils down to 30 seconds or less of information about vps hosting - that's pretty crappy to do to people. It does create a market opportunity for small shops / agencies. Even charging $500 an hour for an initial setup would be fair, since you can template the server deployments and set up small business video hosting pretty trivially. Really, though, you could follow a one page tutorial using Linode or Digital Ocean and the like, and scale your hosting to their plans. Vimeo is not going to survive long being the "bad guy" in this market. They need a visionary, but they've got conservative plodders.
- 999900000999 5y ago
  Once you get done with the consulting fees and follow up work, 3500$ a year isn't bad. Vimeo isn't doing this to be mean. If it was easy to do it an affordable manner, I'm a sure one of us techies could whip it up ( a Video hosting service )in about a week or two, but I strongly suspect you'd end up losing money.
hkt 5y ago
I suspect not. A VPS on the order of £10/month could do this fairly well, and I've seen managed services options at £50/hour/month. Even assuming half a day to set up standard monitoring services etc, and another to set up someone's choice of FLOSS video hosting and blogging platform of choice. Subsequent years won't have the outlay of the first either.
ipaddr 5y ago
I will gladly ftp your video files to a 5 dollar server for a reasonable rate. Dollar a video..

lawl 5y ago

It seems they're using akamai adaptive media delivery. Unfortunately akamai doesn't seem to have pricing on the page. So maybe akamai is just milking them and they're passing the cost on to their customers. Though I do have to wonder about a video hosting "technology platform" that's just selling a thin webinterface on top of akamai. I agree, you can do this on $10 per month yourself if you have the skills and $3500 is ridiculous.

skuhn 5y ago
At the scale I presume Vimeo operates at, for US/EU CDN traffic they should be under 1 cent per gigabyte transferred. Perhaps a bit more since it requires more work to obtain competitive pricing from Akamai, and Akamai AMD is a value added service and not just the bulk data CDN.

scruple 5y ago

I built a system that does just this (it's a little bit more complex, of course, but the gist is the same) but for videos that are self-hosted (on our own bare metal servers and data storage) and automatically uploaded from devices in the field. I've never bothered to check costs because they're trivially insignificant for us; We just don't have that many users / devices. It's a niche hobby project that nets us enough money to support itself. I haven't even had to touch any of this infrastructure in literally years. My co-founder occasionally needs to plug a new data drive into the primary and/or back up storage (the server closets are on-premise in his garage) and run an interactive python script to get things configured. Otherwise it all "just works" and maintains itself perfectly well.

manquer 5y ago

Cloudflare stream is 60% of that cost . Vimeo doesn't have CDN network advantage of cloudflare so not it that outrageous. A lot of tech products are as not that much more complex than you say. There are plenty of open source software you could stick into VPS that people pay SaaS service providers with similar features a lot of money for . For someone with the skills it is hard to understand the markup, but those skills are really valuable.