Best Offshore/Bulletproof Hosting for Video/Live Streaming

Hello!
I plan to host a website and a streaming server on the same VPS/VDS sort of. I would consider things like vimeo, youtube, mux, etc but they are not DMCA ignored in any way (and the material that I will be live streaming and hosting will be copyrighted), and I am sure that the content can easily be reported and taken down with a few reports.
I would prefer an offshore/bulletproof hosting that can offer unlimited bandwidth, or at least a very high amount of bandwidth as I anticipate that there will be a lot of people attempting to access the streams. I am also considering that a factor there could be user uploaded content, that would also be copyrighted to some extent.
Budget is around $60-$70 monthly, and I am looking for maybe 3-4 TB to start (I want to be able to easily scale up storage as it could change from month to month).

For the more technical approach, I will be using caddy or nginx as reverse proxy to server my hls (.m3u8) files to the public, so that will act as my video/live streaming server. I am considering time based token authentication but that hasn't been planned as of now. On top of that, I might also consider the use of cloudflare as a cdn as I have heard good things about them.

If you guys also have any offshore/dmca ignored video & live streaming providers that would be kind to share in this thread as well.

Thank you all in advance.

I would have posted this in the Black Hat SEO forum section but I did not see anywhere that was specific to Web Hosting/VPS.

honestly man $70 is cutting it real thin for true bulletproof streaming especially with 4tb storage . most legitimate dmca-ignored hosts in NL or MD will charge u a premium for that kind of bandwidth once u actually start pushing bits
heads up on cloudflare : dont use them for the actual video delivery . their tos is strict on copyrighted streaming and they will ghost ur account the moment a markmonitor or group-ib bot flags ur stream . cloudflare is only good for the frontend white page to hide ur node
for the technical side.. we used a mesh of nginx nodes as edge proxies in the past . u keep ur storage server hidden behind a wireguard tunnel so only the proxy can talk to it . for the hls part make sure ur token auth is handled at the lua level in nginx.. its way faster than passing every request to a php/python backend
also u need to actively hunt the sniffer bots . these rights holders use automated scripts to find the m3u8 files and grab hashes for the dmca report . if u don't have a log sentinel blocking these scrapers based on behavioral patterns ur site will be nuked from google search within 24 hours . check out RU or certain offshore islands for the backend and use the vps proxies as ur frontline

bhseoworld said:

honestly man $70 is cutting it real thin for true bulletproof streaming especially with 4tb storage . most legitimate dmca-ignored hosts in NL or MD will charge u a premium for that kind of bandwidth once u actually start pushing bits
heads up on cloudflare : dont use them for the actual video delivery . their tos is strict on copyrighted streaming and they will ghost ur account the moment a markmonitor or group-ib bot flags ur stream . cloudflare is only good for the frontend white page to hide ur node
for the technical side.. we used a mesh of nginx nodes as edge proxies in the past . u keep ur storage server hidden behind a wireguard tunnel so only the proxy can talk to it . for the hls part make sure ur token auth is handled at the lua level in nginx.. its way faster than passing every request to a php/python backend
also u need to actively hunt the sniffer bots . these rights holders use automated scripts to find the m3u8 files and grab hashes for the dmca report . if u don't have a log sentinel blocking these scrapers based on behavioral patterns ur site will be nuked from google search within 24 hours . check out RU or certain offshore islands for the backend and use the vps proxies as ur frontline

Click to expand...

well damn! first off, thank you so much for ur reply I greatly appreciate it, as well as a write up of your personal experience.

after looking at a few hosts, I agree that my kind of proposed price is a bit steep, however I want to remain at around ~$100 now, maybe without the extra ~4 or so TB - so just storage and ram and I guess a good enough cpu for the main dependencies to function (for anyone curious my solution for that is abusing google one student plan as it’s around 2 TB per person, for 2 years, and not necessarily serve it directly, but sort of reverse proxy from google drive -> server -> user so technically the user doesn’t know that I am using google drive.)

will definitely avoid cloudflare for video delivery as you mentioned, as I didn’t know that their tos was strict, and will stick to them just for hosting the website and hiding the origin. what do you recommend as a cdn for video delivery, if you used one?

making sure that token auth is handled at the lua level is something that I very, very briefly read but didn’t really care to look into. thanks to your mention, I absolutely will.

as for bot protection I didn’t have anything in mind as was going to use cloudflare, but I will most definitely look elsewhere. any potential suggestions on how you were able to mitigate that, if you could? I am looking at a way to do this myself currently, at the server level. had no idea that bots were going to be this much of a problem lol

and yeah ofc having the page show up in google seo would be really nice

thank you so much again for ur help and suggestions, greatly appreciated!

reverse proxying from gdrive is a classic broke boy setup but u need to be careful with the API quotas and the 24h download ban lol . google tracks the egress bandwidth on those student accounts . once u hit a few hundred concurrents , u will start seeing "Download Quota Exceeded" errors and ur stream will black out for everyone
re: cdn for video delivery
since cloudflare is a no-go for the actual bits , look into Bunny . they r cheap and their Edge Rules are powerful for tokens . they do handle some dmca , but if u use their Edge Storage and keep the origin hidden , u can usually ride it out for a long time another option is CDN77 (pricier but more robust) or building ur own DIY Edge Mesh
just rent 5-10 cheap $5 vps nodes in different geos (NL , BG , MD) and use them as cache-proxies (Nginx proxy_cache) . if one node gets a takedown , u just swap the IP in ur load balancer
re: bot protection at server level
if ur going the diy route , u gotta stop sniffer bots at the TLS handshake level
rate limiting by binary - sniffer bots usually try to grab the first few .ts chunks of every stream to get a hash match . limit the number of new .m3u8 requests per IP
referer validation- strictly allow requests only if the referer matches ur domain and the user-agent isn't something generic like python-requests or Go-http-client
hosting the site and the stream on the same box is a single point of failure . split them if u can . gl with the gdrive experiment tho , its a fun game until it pops

bhseoworld said:

reverse proxying from gdrive is a classic broke boy setup but u need to be careful with the API quotas and the 24h download ban lol . google tracks the egress bandwidth on those student accounts . once u hit a few hundred concurrents , u will start seeing "Download Quota Exceeded" errors and ur stream will black out for everyone
re: cdn for video delivery
since cloudflare is a no-go for the actual bits , look into Bunny . they r cheap and their Edge Rules are powerful for tokens . they do handle some dmca , but if u use their Edge Storage and keep the origin hidden , u can usually ride it out for a long time another option is CDN77 (pricier but more robust) or building ur own DIY Edge Mesh
just rent 5-10 cheap $5 vps nodes in different geos (NL , BG , MD) and use them as cache-proxies (Nginx proxy_cache) . if one node gets a takedown , u just swap the IP in ur load balancer
re: bot protection at server level
if ur going the diy route , u gotta stop sniffer bots at the TLS handshake level
rate limiting by binary - sniffer bots usually try to grab the first few .ts chunks of every stream to get a hash match . limit the number of new .m3u8 requests per IP
referer validation- strictly allow requests only if the referer matches ur domain and the user-agent isn't something generic like python-requests or Go-http-client
hosting the site and the stream on the same box is a single point of failure . split them if u can . gl with the gdrive experiment tho , its a fun game until it pops

Click to expand...

well i kinda am a broke boy, lols; it's either abuse gdrive or find a vds/vps with a lot of upgradable storage for cheap, or gdrive

will look into bunny or cdn77, and will look into diff node locations and nginx proxy cache

was thinking to prevent google nuking my website, main site will be one domain and actual stream url will be another url that i don't care about and doesn't even show up in seo search results (.su, .cr, etc), and will look at other options to prevents those bots at the tls level, as well as rate limiting which should be very simple. potentially using nginx ngx_http_secure_link_module could be of use to me as well.

thanks for your good luck wishes, i sure will need it

I help people doing off-shore deployments, far from any DMCA in specific countries that will not sell you to any authority and will keep you privacy at max levels. Budget depends on how many data you need to store, how many calls you do, how many users do you have... 70$ a month is prob. the price for 1 avg VPS, and for a project like this you will probably need 3-4 vps if you want to provide a good service to your customers. I have a software deployed like that in 14 different VPS and is costing me 1200$ a month.

buried said:

Hello!
I plan to host a website and a streaming server on the same VPS/VDS sort of. I would consider things like vimeo, youtube, mux, etc but they are not DMCA ignored in any way (and the material that I will be live streaming and hosting will be copyrighted), and I am sure that the content can easily be reported and taken down with a few reports.
I would prefer an offshore/bulletproof hosting that can offer unlimited bandwidth, or at least a very high amount of bandwidth as I anticipate that there will be a lot of people attempting to access the streams. I am also considering that a factor there could be user uploaded content, that would also be copyrighted to some extent.
Budget is around $60-$70 monthly, and I am looking for maybe 3-4 TB to start (I want to be able to easily scale up storage as it could change from month to month).

For the more technical approach, I will be using caddy or nginx as reverse proxy to server my hls (.m3u8) files to the public, so that will act as my video/live streaming server. I am considering time based token authentication but that hasn't been planned as of now. On top of that, I might also consider the use of cloudflare as a cdn as I have heard good things about them.

If you guys also have any offshore/dmca ignored video & live streaming providers that would be kind to share in this thread as well.

Thank you all in advance.

I would have posted this in the Black Hat SEO forum section but I did not see anywhere that was specific to Web Hosting/VPS.

Click to expand...

Try our breakthrough P2P technology to reduce your CDN traffic distribution costs by more than 50%+

been in a similar situation where i needed reliable video hosting without breaking the bank. ended up using embvid.com its like bunny stream but cheaper. handles all the hls transcoding, adaptive bitrate, embed player etc so you dont have to deal with setting up ffmpeg and nginx yourself.
they also have pay as you go billing which is nice if your storage needs change month to month like you mentioned. might be worth checking out before going the full diy route.

For large-scale streaming, it’s safer and more sustainable to use providers that offer high bandwidth and clear abuse policies rather than relying on so-called bulletproof hosting.

Uplink is also very important, you do need a minimum of 1gbps dedicated uplink, not shared, and a good offshore location like Seychelles will do good, or Switzerland.

Using a separate domain for the stream url is a good move, it's a simple way to isolate the risk and prevent Google from nuking your main site. Nginx ngx_http_secure_link_module can definitely help with securing your streams, I've seen it perform noticeably better when combined with rate limiting and IP blocking. For off-shore deployments, it's all about finding the right balance between cost and privacy, some countries are more relaxed when it comes to DMCA notices. What I've noticed is that having a good understanding of your traffic patterns and user behavior can help you optimize your infrastructure and reduce costs. Bunny and CDN77 are solid options for content delivery, but if you're on a tight budget, a DIY Edge Mesh can be a more affordable solution, just make sure to choose the right locations for your nodes.