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Marco Demaio
Asked: 2010-02-16 04:30:18 +0800 CST

Server bandwidth for video streaming website

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I need to put on a website videos that can ba shown using a common swf player (like flowplayer).

Videos are about 3/4 minutes each (400 MB) in MPEG4/H264 compression.

I was thinking to buy a normal hosting plan package. But how much bandwidth/month do you think I need? Let' say I could have 5000 visitors per day watching each one of them an average of 1 video.

BTW: do you think it's normal that a 3/4 minutes video take 400MB in space?

Thanks!

bandwidth video video-streaming video-hosting

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    400MB of space for a video that sounds very uncompressed... That is way too big for 3-4 minutes.

    For the bandwidth per month, simple math 5000 * 1 * 400 = 2TB per day. That's way too much bandwith for a normal hosting plan package. You should consider getting a dedicated server.

    You should also consider instantaneous bandwidth. This means you have to ask yourself : "How many users will watch the video at once at peak time ?". You're not going to need as much bandwidth if they all watch it at the same time or if they all watch it one at a time. You have to check the bit rate of your video in order to know a little more about this.

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  2. I do video to >500k people per day and what you're planning with bankrupt you or have your hosting company shut your site down within days - most likely both.

    As Antoine states you will have to use a dedicated server for this and you also need to discuss this level of bandwidth with your hosting company - they may be able to offer you a much better deal if you plan it with them.

    Out of interest are you going to have a larger content pool than your cache/s? if not what's your disk random-read performance going to be like? If you were to somehow spread out your 5k load evenly over a 24 hours period (and that's REALLY not what will happen) that's still 4 x 1.6MB/sec you need to server...consistently...ever minute of every day...without jitter - quite a tall order for one or two SATA disks.

    Oh and Antoine is right, 400MB for 4 minutes is almost exactly ten times the bit-rate I ship, are you sure it's right?

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