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> hundreds of videos and thousands of hours of content: just charge me a fee to host my videos. I'd pay $100/month $100 wouldn't even cover the storage mate. L

by ffsm8 2y ago

> hundreds of videos and thousands of hours of content: just charge me a fee to host my videos. I'd pay $100/month $100 wouldn't even cover the storage mate. Let's say you've got 2 thousand hours of content (smallest amount that qualifies for "thousands") At 2k resolution, that'd be around 30TB And you'll want to preprocess it to 1080p, 720p, 480p, so add another 15tb for the other resolutions. And YouTube supports 4k, so if you're shooting at that resolution, you can add another 50tb on top. Purely storage you're already looking at a ~$2500 monthly bill. And then you're gonna have to host and serve it to hundreds of thousands of viewers, the bandwidth cost is gonna be astronomical. Every 100 hours of streamed content is gonna be another ~$100 on top. With a 15 minute video, that'd be 400 views. And I significantly rounded down on every calculation as this is napkin math. If you'd use AWS S3 pricing for storage and egress you can safely double my dollar numbers.

gizajob 2y ago
I’m sure you’re right but how does Google afford to do it then? Do they have methods to drastically lower those costs? $2500 per month for each creator seems like it wouldn’t be a business worth running.
- ffsm8 2y ago
  There are very, very few YouTube creators that actually have thousands of hours of video. Even if it's a vtuber/live streamer they'd still have to publish ~6 hours every day for a full year to get to 2 thousand hours It's pretty much the peak of the iceberg
2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago
I think your pricing is quite a little bloated. Having said that, nobody can even in a lifetime produce thousands of hours of valuable content. But the fact that it's free to do so has content creators dump all their crap on youtube instead of being forced to cut it down to actually valuable 1% of it.
roenxi 2y ago
That seems like someone has some extremely comfortable margins, $2,500/month could buy me ~50TB of hard disk space at consumer prices. I'm sure that sort of estimate is undercalling the complexity of a storage operation, but nonetheless - there'd have to be some discounts to be found. If nothing else, Backblaze claims to be able to store that much for $300/month. $100/month for 50TB probably isn't feasible but start compromising on resolution and something could be made to work.
- ffsm8 2y ago
  To get 50TB usable storage you're gonna need at least 100TB, otherwise everything will go down once a single disk fails until you've restored the raid. Unless you want to be completely capped and unable to ever publish again you're gonna have to add at least a few TB (+10TB, 120TB total) and then you'll need a secondary storage for backup, so another 60 TB, 180TB total At $320 per 16TB disk that can handle being active 24/7 (actually only ~14 TB usable, but let's ignore that) you're left with $3750 at the very least, ignoring that you'll have to continuously replace them, electricity is also pretty expensive with HDDs. House them in a server etc You too are wildly off with your math, as I'm literally flooring every calculation. Realistic estimates by a professional are gonna be _way_ higher, especially because this kind of storage doesn't have the iops to serve video to multiple consumers. It'd be at best a NAS that can serve to maybe 2-4 ppl at a time
  - roenxi 2y ago
    > ...as I'm literally flooring every calculation. But your calculations are for a different problem. You're not solving for "what is the best I can do for $100". You're solving for "what do I need to clone Google's infrastructure for thousands of hours of video footage". Eg, you doubled the amount of storage space to avoid rebuilding RAIDs when a disk goes down. There is an obvious alternative - don't do that, let the RAID go down and rebuild it while eating the downtime. That sort of thing isn't a big deal for discount video hosting. Maybe even force people to keep their own backups.
    - ffsm8 2y ago
bauruine 2y ago
You can get 4x22TB (60TB with RAID5) for ~120$ so for less than 250$ you get the storage with geo redundancy. https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/sx65/ https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/sx65/
movedx 2y ago
You literally skipped the part where I said I'd be happy to be limited to a set number of videos per channel.
- ffsm8 2y ago
  You also need to be happy with a limited amount of views with that scheme/ videos going private after that, because storage is literally the cheapest cost. I used that as an example how far removed you're from a realistic price estimate

by ffsm8 2y ago

gizajob 2y ago

I’m sure you’re right but how does Google afford to do it then? Do they have methods to drastically lower those costs? $2500 per month for each creator seems like it wouldn’t be a business worth running.

ffsm8 2y ago
There are very, very few YouTube creators that actually have thousands of hours of video. Even if it's a vtuber/live streamer they'd still have to publish ~6 hours every day for a full year to get to 2 thousand hours It's pretty much the peak of the iceberg

2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago

I think your pricing is quite a little bloated. Having said that, nobody can even in a lifetime produce thousands of hours of valuable content. But the fact that it's free to do so has content creators dump all their crap on youtube instead of being forced to cut it down to actually valuable 1% of it.

roenxi 2y ago

That seems like someone has some extremely comfortable margins, $2,500/month could buy me ~50TB of hard disk space at consumer prices. I'm sure that sort of estimate is undercalling the complexity of a storage operation, but nonetheless - there'd have to be some discounts to be found. If nothing else, Backblaze claims to be able to store that much for $300/month. $100/month for 50TB probably isn't feasible but start compromising on resolution and something could be made to work.

ffsm8 2y ago
To get 50TB usable storage you're gonna need at least 100TB, otherwise everything will go down once a single disk fails until you've restored the raid. Unless you want to be completely capped and unable to ever publish again you're gonna have to add at least a few TB (+10TB, 120TB total) and then you'll need a secondary storage for backup, so another 60 TB, 180TB total At $320 per 16TB disk that can handle being active 24/7 (actually only ~14 TB usable, but let's ignore that) you're left with $3750 at the very least, ignoring that you'll have to continuously replace them, electricity is also pretty expensive with HDDs. House them in a server etc You too are wildly off with your math, as I'm literally flooring every calculation. Realistic estimates by a professional are gonna be _way_ higher, especially because this kind of storage doesn't have the iops to serve video to multiple consumers. It'd be at best a NAS that can serve to maybe 2-4 ppl at a time
- roenxi 2y ago
  > ...as I'm literally flooring every calculation. But your calculations are for a different problem. You're not solving for "what is the best I can do for $100". You're solving for "what do I need to clone Google's infrastructure for thousands of hours of video footage". Eg, you doubled the amount of storage space to avoid rebuilding RAIDs when a disk goes down. There is an obvious alternative - don't do that, let the RAID go down and rebuild it while eating the downtime. That sort of thing isn't a big deal for discount video hosting. Maybe even force people to keep their own backups.
  - ffsm8 2y ago

bauruine 2y ago

You can get 4x22TB (60TB with RAID5) for ~120$ so for less than 250$ you get the storage with geo redundancy. https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/sx65/ https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/sx65/

movedx 2y ago

You literally skipped the part where I said I'd be happy to be limited to a set number of videos per channel.

ffsm8 2y ago
You also need to be happy with a limited amount of views with that scheme/ videos going private after that, because storage is literally the cheapest cost. I used that as an example how far removed you're from a realistic price estimate