How to distribute videos through Dedicated servers?

Hey!

So my team of devs originally started our file host by using bunny stream. However, Bunny is not good because it is too expensive in terms of bandwidth consumption.

Here is what we're trying to do BUT WE NEED HELP! My devs don't understand how to go from...............

OVH Dedicated server (with unlimited bandwidth [1gbit])
to
Playable video on our video player

Any tips?

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Side question: We were using Bunny's API for everything. I assume OVH has an API for users to upload their files to?

SaveFiles said:

Any tips?

Click to expand...

Problem with this is scalability. It's not straightforward at all. Generally all CDN are expensive for a reason, there are other specific platforms like Wowza that can be slightly cheaper and more specialized than a CDN but still, they are not cheap at all.
Yes you could always get a single dedi server and scale from there, but the limitations are massive and you will run out of resources pretty quickly (unless you dont plan to scale too much)
For example, if its a closed LMS with a limited number of paid users, doing it this way is perfectly ideal.
Problem is when you have an open video streaming service with no limitation, and you are expecting a couple thousand users streaming. Then a single dedi is gonna be a true issue.

You need to build a full infrastructure. The other day I was reading about building our own mattermost server which happens to be, more or less the same technology as a regular video streaming service.
Here in Performance, you could see how many VPS they were using for a simple 1000 user streaming + screen sharing (say that the screen sharing part, is equivalent to a regular video stream), and each call, the number of different videos being streamed at the same time
https://docs.mattermost.com/configure/calls-deployment.html#performance

With this numbers you could see that a $2K/mo infrastructure, could serve 4 calls (4 videos), to 1000 simoultaneous users at 83% load.

Instead of RTCD, you might be using RTMP or HLS and for the rest, you might be using pretty much the same, the reverse proxy, the load balancers, the load testing agents etc, the web server for the site to present the content and obviously a part that is not included there, the data server for the videos... so it might even increase a little bit more the costs. Not to say that maintaining this, is not easy peasy at all and can be a massive headache if you are not proficient in sysadm. I've been working in this for a couple years in the past, and despite I think I could build this, I would prefer never to do it.