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> creating DDoS levels of traffic Author here. This has never been a problem, both in terms of volume and cost. I host ~0.25% (maybe more? I haven't checked re
by bastawhiz 4y ago
> creating DDoS levels of traffic
Author here. This has never been a problem, both in terms of volume and cost. I host ~0.25% (maybe more? I haven't checked recently) of all podcasts listed on Apple and up to a few years ago, I wasn't even using a CDN. Two Heroku dynos at ~$250/mo (25 customer subscriptions today) running a Python back-end with no caching at all was able to keep up without trouble. In fact, the only reason I added a CDN was Heroku's infrastructure having spooky issues with that volume of traffic.
Podcast hosting providers larger than me running on their own hardware should have (had) exactly zero trouble.
- georgel 4y agoThe entirety of all the podcasts on iTunes/Apple Podcasts RSS feeds downloaded is around 200-250GB across the 2.5M+ pods. Hosting the RSS feed should be an easy task. Add in caching via ETag and server-side (host the feed as a static file, only re-render when user updates something), and your server load goes down drastically. It gets a bit complex if your hosting company supports dynamic audio/ad insertion depending on how you accomplish that, but as far as retrieving the RSS XML feed, that has no impact.
- bastawhiz 4y agoAudio insertion is actually straightforward: the audio URLs from the feed can redirect!
- ryanbrunner 4y agoI agree with this. We actually dynamically render RSS feeds (we have some personalization options) and while we've had to optimize it here and there, it doesn't even register as a real cost or problem (streaming MP3 files to listeners is the real cost of hosting podcasts).