Hello,
For your first question, related to the VPS.
- It would be required to have a very large amount of bandwidth and a good uplink/port (connection) not just some 10mbit shared to the other servers on the node. Also, if these 50 slot shoutcast servers being ran on there are all going to be running the same time, and have close to MAX. listeners on each one, I wouldn't run no more then 2-3 max on the VPS, and that's only if you have a good connection and bandwidth allocation on it. As I assume you wish for it to perform well and be reliable without needing to reboot it daily and have service interruptions.
For the dedicated server question.
The same applies for the Dedicated Server as the VPS for what I mentioned about Bandwidth and your Uplink/Port, if you don't have tons of bandwidth and at least a 100mbit uplink / dedicated port, I wouldn't really waste your time. But with this server I believe if everything else adds up, you could prob get about 5-7 shoutcast servers running and it be overwell decent.
Someone else might respond and say you might be able to add more but its' really what you want out of it, to make it last, be reliable, and have a overall good, strong and reliable shoutcast station, I would keep it around these specs.
I have some experience with Shoutcast and I know it can be a pain in the ass managing, running, and even setting up. Our business offers a private shoutcast solutions and the gear we host our shoutcast servers on is some high-end gear, which isn't really cheap. You do not need a super-super high-end server, but you need a decent processor, decent amount of RAM, and tons of bandwidth with a nice uplink/connection.
Our standard server configurations / setups are listed below, the first one is more of our smaller end, not so big stations/shoutcast servers, or small use servers, then the second server build is our more higher-end server requirements, and large stations. We have customers with stations running 24/7 with 400+ average listeners daily.
Intel Quad Core - Core2Quad
4 CPU Cores,
6GB RAM
500GB HDD
100Mbps, Dedicated port (Unmetered bandwidth usage).
and our bigger customer servers,
Intel E3 Xeon, 1230
4 Cores, 8 Threads.
8 GB RAM
1 TB HD
100Mbps Dedicated Port (Unmetered bandwidth usage).
(We also have limited server config running this setup, but with a 1Gbit Port also (LIMITED).
This server configuration we tend to host more SC servers then we do on the other server,
as it's able to hold much more, and it overall has a great reliability. It just depends on what you wish to do and how you wish to operate and manage your servers and customers.
I wouldn't suggest doing what I exactly did with our business, as our service being provided is much different then your normal shoutcast hosting provider, as we provide it to dedicated internet stations, talk radios, and community's that like to have live broadcasting over it, and have management options to manage their show, along with a customized full on control panel developed by us for RADIO, TALK SHOW, and other uses. We also have some customizations done for our customers to allow different things and we charge differently then by how many slots or listeners the station has, and we don't usually lock in a set number of listeners or slots the customer may have, we do have a max, but each server and package is different. We also own the gear being ran for our SC service provided and it's located in our data center, managed by our on-site staff.
I stand by this. If you invest that extra money, it's worth it in the end. You might not make the huge profit in the start, but overall and in the end it pays off and was worth it. We actually do very well with our setup and station solutions. As mentioned, and our servers are based off of the two shown above, all of our servers for our shoutcast nodes are either one of them two nodes and we have about 17 servers running currently are sold-out of space. It's a great thing, but it's something you have to invest your money and time into building and tuning everything just right.
Good luck,
My suggestion really,
Invest some, instead of doing small, just do average server and start smaller say 25 slots and optimize everything, it's always easy to upgrade as needed. We are actually testing out a cloud setup as we speak to replace the smaller server config we use to test it out, and so far it's early in development stages so I cannot speak on judging this method yet, but the overall idea if you think about it, it seems the best way and cheapest if you do that right also . Ever thought about looking into a cloud server? As they are very easy to manage, upgrade, and reliable and fail-safe. You can add/remove what you don't need, and only be charged for what you use/want.
We are just working on a replacement that is optional for our customers until we either complete it and it does well and is wanted by our customers, or is a extra option for them to choose when ordering or wanting a SC server, is the reason we are working on a cloud setup for our SC to see how it would play out and work overall.
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