Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Running a Web Hosting Business : Shoutcast small Company

[newhere]

Hi , i'm new here i want to ask how to create a shoutcast icecast streaming small business ?

[UH-Bobby]

This post would probably be better under the "Running a webhosting company" forum. Anyway, I would probably search that forum, as I'm sure that somebody has probably asked that very same question.

[p[]]

Well Icecast I believe is known to perform better. A comparison is here, although it is based at icecast's website, I've heard things from neutral sources.

Also as Bobby suggested, I would run a search on the forums.

Good luck.

[BillBrown]

On an RPM-based Linux box, Icecast is pretty easy to set up if you have root. You may need to install some depenancies but that wouldn't take long if you have a package manager like yum or urpmi.

You may want something between you/your media and Icecast though like Liveice that would encode an mpeg stream so that you can broadcast it with Icecast. Liveice can take a little bit longer to configure but it's not too bad. There are plenty of resources available for helping to get it working. Because Liveice likes to completely consume /dev/dsp, you'll need to keep it off the machine that your audio media is stored on. http://web.arm.ac.uk/~spm/software/liveice.html

Bill

[WirralNet Matt]

To start up, do some research. Get a network that can handle huge bandwidth requirements, make sure it is a totally reliable network.

There is nothing worse then an overrun network causing streams to buffer every 5 seconds or a network that is down 5% of the time.

With regards to server power, it doesnt matter much, a P3 will do nicely. With regards to server admin, its all quite basic, but if you are not competent on a server, learning how to run the DNAS itself will take 10 minutes or so, but get a professional in to harden it and keep it running sweet.

If you are using the servers solely for shoutcast though, you dont even need Apache running, and you should never really see any load at all on the CPU and the server will generally run sweet 24/7.

Dont compete on price, if you do, you will kill yourself straight away as the pricing within the industry nowadays is stupid.

I have had 3 customers sign up this month as a direct result of very cheap companies not being able to proivde the services they paid for.

Also, I wouldnt recommend doing what a lot of cheap companies are doing and hosting the streams on a web hosting server, get a server that is dedicated for shoutcast and nothing else.

Finally, get either a huge bandwidth level or a unmetered server, as shoutcast WILL eat a HUGE amount of bandwidth and data transfer.

There are a few companies offering shoutcast reseller plans nowadays, you may wanna check em out, but again, make sure its reliable.

[Adam H]

Originally Posted by Xcellweb Matt

Also, I wouldnt recommend doing what a lot of cheap companies are doing and hosting the streams on a web hosting server, get a server that is dedicated for shoutcast and nothing else.

Agreed.

If you want to maintain a serious uptime of your shoutcast you will want to put it on a machine that you wont need to touch most of the time.

[BillBrown]

I can't speak to Shoutcast but my Icecast/Liveice box was a Pentium 133 with like 64MB RAM that ran with absolutely no problems at all. You might want a Web server so you can monitor the Icecast/Shoutcast stats and mountpoints but it's not necessary for the broadcast's operation.