Can anyone tell me what the recommended server requirements would be to broadcast a live 24/7 video feed?
The live feed would basically be a programmed schedule of video files synchronized amongst all viewers. The feed would likely be broadcast using Adobe FMS. And let’s say the average bitrate of the videos is about 1600 Kbits/s. Any advice would be much appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
Depends on how many users as well. If you are broadcasting 24/7 then I’d say the highest top end server from any provider should do. VPS can work but if you want high power, you might have to get the highest plan.
That rather depends upon the quality of the video you want, the number of users, and how palatable interruptions to broadcast might be.
I’d expect that you’re going to need to be load balanced, so have a few machines, probably relatively good specifications.
Might be an idea to talk to the hosting people, as I’d hate to recommend something then you find you need to upgrade, and what you have prevents you from doing so.
You might also find that there is a fair use policy on the bandwidth you plan to use, so I’d check that too.
Is there a way I can calculate the requirements? What would the variables be?
The primary consideration that will limit your throughput is the network card. Any good spec (decent quad core with 8g+ memory, good disk i/o) should be able to do 1000 simultaneous streams. You’re best to avoid a VPS unless you’re looking at low stream numbers, as you want uncontended use of all the available port bandwidth, and you don’t want unexpected i/o or cpu blips from other users. It’s possible to have a secondary nic to shift even more bandwidth if you have enough cpu and disk speed.There are various optimizations you can do to FMS that will take the same spec and go towards 2000 streams on one box.
Make a decision on how many users you will cap your feed to, that’ll give you something to work to in terms of bandwidth, if there is no real time stream processing going on and its just about shoveling the data to the user, bandwidth will be your biggest requirement.
However, if you are looking to do things like realtime scaling of the feeds to cater for users connections, you’ll want a lot more processing resources.
Though, as soon as you start feeding to multiple users, you will want to make sure you can get the data from the hard disk at a decent speed as well as send it to the users.
But as has already been said, you would be better with a proper dedicated server for stream hosting.
Thats for sure must be dedicated server, the CPU & memory will depend on the OS you will be using. For windows you will need a high end server and for linux is middle end. Dont recommend windows hosting at all - windows = troubles// At second you will need a ton of bandwidth - try to get hosting company that offers a ton of bandwidth in a monthly plan and offers additional bandwidth for a cheap/
Btw, whats the streaming platform you’re going to use ? adobe flash?
Video Broadcasting website needs good amount of RAM and the bandwidth usage of the website will depend upon the number of concurrent listeners. Dedicated server is always recommended for hosting Video Broadcasting websites as they have more amount of resources available on on them are more as compared to VPS. Moreover the resources like RAM and CPU are dedicated to a single user in Dedicated servers whereas incase of VPS’s they share the resources of the main server/node on which they are created. Port speed also plays a major role in this case. Port speed of Dedicated server will always be multiple times more than a VPS which will help your songs to get streamed quickly.
If you are not expecting large number of concurrent users initially, you can start with a Dual Core Dedicated server with 2 GB RAM and 2-4 MB cache and upgrade onto a Quad Core server as your websites becomes popular and you start getting more visitors on it.