Is there an agreed upon way to self host videos for less?
For those of you that have done this, what would/does hosting and serving large videos cost you a month and how are you doing it?
Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”
81–90 of 317 posts
Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
With this amount of views you can just rent a cheap VPS with a few terabytes of included egress traffic, put up a very basic index.html, and stream those videos via the browser's HTML5 video player. This costs about $5 per month, maybe add $5 for more storage. I get that not everybody has the skills to do this and payments are handled by Vimeo but $3500 is outrageous.
3500 a year is significantly less than hiring someone to do it for you.
I suspect not. A VPS on the order of £10/month could do this fairly well, and I've seen managed services options at £50/hour/month. Even assuming half a day to set up standard monitoring services etc, and another to set up someone's choice of FLOSS video hosting and blogging platform of choice. Subsequent years won't have the outlay of the first either.
Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not that it excuses what's happening, or that it really puts her in the "top 1 percent"...but despite the low views, she could still be using a lot of bandwidth. Her videos appear to be tutorials that are pretty long, most of them 1 hour+: https://loish.net/tutorials/ It wouldn't take many views/month to use a lot of bandwidth, assuming her customers watch the whole thing. That's perhaps not worth $3500/year, but I c…
Just to compare to Cloudflare Stream which I consider a honest paid platform: Streaming is $1 per 1000 minutes delivered Storage is $5 per 1000 minutes store per month. 117 videos with 2 hours each and with 150 views each: 117 * 2 * 60 = 14040 minutes stored or $14/month for storage which is $168/year. 117 * 2 * 60 * 150 = 2106000 minutes delivered or $2106. So $3500/year does not seem outrageous.
You do realize that's ~60% of what they attempted to shake them down for, right?
An existing customer?
With no reasonable notice?
Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
They said it's a custom plan. And if her videos are multiple hours long, but not being watched all the way through, yet the Vimeo client downloads the entire video when you click play (i believe this is how it works, it's not a rolling buffer like YouTube, could be wrong)...that sounds like an issue Vimeo should fix, not the creator.
But why would they invest time and energy fixing a flaw for a customer spending $200/yr? That pays for like 2 hours of a senior engineer. More expedient to ask them to pay more or leave.
Because it will save them money on all videos that aren't fully watched. Great ROI
Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”
#85> She’s uploaded 117 subscriber-only videos so far, and each one only gets around 150 views on average. Her most viewed video has around 815 views. … Her bandwidth usage was within the top 1 percent of Vimeo users, the company said Well that’s telling. Sounds like a company that’s on the rocks trying to squeeze money out of a small number of users to survive.
I wouldn't be surprised if "99th percentile of users" is calculated across all user accounts, including ones who logged in once a decade ago and never uploaded a video.
Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”
#86Am I the only one thinking, "fair enough" ? Vimeo has transitioned through different strategic directions, and seems to have settled on B2B -- if this doesnt work for a platform user, move platform.
They're doing a horrible job at "B2B" atm then. Have a client that is thinking of using them, and I'm starting to think that Vimeo is a "Bad Idea". I can't safely or with any confidence advise them what their costs are going to be a few months down the line. You know it's a bad sign when you have to go through a sales or "contact us for a custom plan" process in order to get details. That's not B2B anymore, that's now "B 2 VeryLarge-B".
Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”
#87Vimeo is dying. There is no way they can stay afloat abusing their tiny and shrinking user base with an increasingly exorbitant pricing.
IBM disagrees.
Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not that it excuses what's happening, or that it really puts her in the "top 1 percent"...but despite the low views, she could still be using a lot of bandwidth. Her videos appear to be tutorials that are pretty long, most of them 1 hour+: https://loish.net/tutorials/ It wouldn't take many views/month to use a lot of bandwidth, assuming her customers watch the whole thing. That's perhaps not worth $3500/year, but I c…
With this amount of views you can just rent a cheap VPS with a few terabytes of included egress traffic, put up a very basic index.html, and stream those videos via the browser's HTML5 video player. This costs about $5 per month, maybe add $5 for more storage. I get that not everybody has the skills to do this and payments are handled by Vimeo but $3500 is outrageous.
I built a system that does just this (it's a little bit more complex, of course, but the gist is the same) but for videos that are self-hosted (on our own bare metal servers and data storage) and automatically uploaded from devices in the field. I've never bothered to check costs because they're trivially insignificant for us; We just don't have that many users / devices. It's a niche hobby project that nets us enough money to support itself. I haven't even had to touch any of this infrastructure in literally years. My co-founder occasionally needs to plug a new data drive into the primary and/or back up storage (the server closets are on-premise in his garage) and run an interactive python script to get things configured. Otherwise it all "just works" and maintains itself perfectly well.
Re: Vimeo: “We are a B2B solution, not the indie version of YouTube.”
#89Look at transit prices https://blog.telegeography.com/2021-global-ip-transit-price-... 1mbps a month is 320 gigabyte so 2TB is 6mbps which costs a whopping 3.6 USD in Hong Kong 1.2 USD elsewhere. Where I am wrong?
If you don't want to deal with storage, Backblaze B2 is $5/TB/month and the Bandwidth Alliance will reduce/eliminate the egress costs.