Video/media hosting cheaper than Amazon s3?

I would like to suggest Rackspace or MaxCDN

Might not be directly related to your main issue, but you might need to check if your hosted video is properly encoded/compressed before upload as well. You might be using too high of a resolution that's unnecessary for your type of video output.

If your uploaded video is so high in quality and low in compression that'd be ideal for viewing on HD TVs, it'll use up so much more bandwidth than a simple 700px compressed video, for example.

Just an idea.

There is no such thing as unlimited bandwidth. Many companies will use that as a marketing line, but when it comes down to it, you use too much and they will say your abusive and charge your more or cancel you.

You can get a server with a dedicated connection, such as a 10Mbps connection where you can max out that connection 24x7 for the same cost, and that would normally be cheaper than a CDN, but you lose the advantage of being on a distributed network. Plus your limited to the capacity of that line. If you have spikes in traffic, you very well may use more than 10Mbps with of transfer at one time. Plus a connection like that form a quality company isn't going to be all that cheap.

Most of the CDN's are in the same ball park as Amazon or higher. With most CDN's You can negotiate better rates when your into the multiple thousands a month. Amazon's edge servers might run you a little bit cheaper if your using S3 now.

The thing is you don't really want to serve that kind of video load from a single location. You want a distributed service / CDN to improve the quality (speed / prevent pauses) of playback.

Rackspace will not be cheaper, they mainly specialize in high end managed service, they do have a cloud and some VPS, but last I looked they ran about 20% higher than amazon on their transfer cost.

Re-encoding / knocking down the quality may be a good option for you.

If you dig, your going to find people that sell bandwidth cheaper and make all kinds of promises. The fact of the matter is that it isn't really viable for most providers to offer tier 1 CDN bandwidth for much cheaper than what your getting it for now. The only exception being for very large accounts it gets to the point where it can be worth it to the provider if they have a pretty large amount of guaranteed revenue from you.

On amazon once you get to 5,000TB a month you get down to .055 a GB, but your spending several hundred thousand dollars a month to get that pricing.

I really feel your quality / reliability is going to suffer if you switch away from one of the big CDN's. All of the big reputable CDN's that I know of are give or take in the same ballpark for transfer costs.

There are distributed computing models that you can setup, such as with high end VPS servers that can emulate what a CDN does, but for the level your at, your costs will almost certainly run higher, as the cost for transfer on a quality VPS often still runs around .10/GB.

Jamie

Umm, YouTube setting them to unlisted and embedding them won't work?

I gather there must be some sort of secrecy issue going on so feel free to ignore this if that's not workable.

True 'nuff I guess.

Thanks guys I appreciate the info - this is for both sales pages and a member area (to answer Joseph's question)...

I'll stick with s3 for the sales videos, and might switch the member videos to YouTube. I've also gotten the file size way down on the video that was getting the most views, so that should help quite a bit already.

-Bryan

One more thing that may help save bandwidth cost if you are ok with people having content stored in their cache and you get a lot of return visitors is consider delivering it via progressive downloads. google "streaming vs. progressive downloads" there is a lot of info about the pro/cons of both.

Hey Bro,

Checkout Backblaze.

They are supposed to be 25 times chepaer that AmazonS3 I am looking at making the switch..

Good luck man: Backblaze Blog » Backblaze 2.0: Unlimiting unlimited

Josh

Vimeo is a great option as well. You may want to look into it