Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Specialty Hosting and Markets : VOIP etc : Online radio station - Is unlimited bandwidth truely unlimited?

[levavie]

We want to set up a web radio station, broadcasting 18-24 hours / 6 days aweek. We are currently having up to 500 concurrent listeners, and paying hefty prices for our local streaming server. With 1000 concurrent users at 32kbps, a simple calculation shows we need 20 Terabytes per month. And if our listening jumps to 10,000 concurrent listeners, we will need 200 TeraBytes per month.

Many shared hosting websites claim they provide unlimited bandwidth. Is it a good plan? And what are the real limitations?

Other options I am aware of are "p2p radio" (there is a software with that name which do work - but with a cumbersome interface), and CDN+P2p (Pando Networks). Are there any other alternatives with a reasonable bandwidth price?

I would love to hear your experience.

Thanks in advance,

Amnon
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Amnon Levav
Levavie Integrated Consulting

[cristibighea]

Well, it depends what you consider a reasonable price. The unlimited offers are usually oversold, you can imagine that other people are getting the same 100mbps unlimited/unmetered package you are buying and you will not be pushing max capacity every month unless you buy a dedicated port, which will cost significantly more.

It might work for you to work with a CDN provider when you can commit to a large amount of TB per month, but you'll most likely need a custom solution there or use Windows Media streaming.

[levavie]

Originally Posted by cristibighea

Well, it depends what you consider a reasonable price.

Our current streaming hosting provider bills us for 600$ per month for 500 concurrent listeners.

Originally Posted by cristibighea

The unlimited offers are usually oversold, you can imagine that other people are getting the same 100mbps unlimited/unmetered package you are buying and you will not be pushing max capacity every month unless you buy a dedicated port, which will cost significantly more.

How do I calculate the true actual bandwidth of 'unlimited' deals like those of bluehost (7$/month)?

[Dan_EZPZ]

There's no hard number that a host offering "Unlimited" bandwidth will allow - they'll cut you off whenever they want to.

You wouldn't be able to run a streaming server from a shared host anyway, you'd need a VPS at least; though with your requirements you will need a dedicated server with a lot of bandwidth.

[cristibighea]

When I said unlimited/unmetered I was talking about some of the stuff that you see on dedicated servers, not shared hosts. On shared hosts that oversell(like bluehost) you won't get to use a lot of space/bandwidth before they start giving you suspensions for using too much memory/cpu and so on, which they cover in their terms, but of course, there is absolutely no way for you to verify if you actually used as much as they told you.

[SSHocker]

It seems most streaming plans for shoutcast etc. charge per slots rather than per GB.

When I was looking for shoutcast $30-40 per 100 slots seemed to be around the going rate.

[levavie]

Originally Posted by SSHocker

It seems most streaming plans for shoutcast etc. charge per slots rather than per GB.

When I was looking for shoutcast $30-40 per 100 slots seemed to be around the going rate.

This is cheaper then my current host - 150$ - 200$ per 500 slots is less then 40% - but as long as the billing is done per slot it's still not scalable. P2P (like the open-source 'p2p radio' software) seems like an interesting option, if quality is enough.

[BELLonline]

Stream hosts normally offer unlimited bandwidth as they limit slots and bitrate rather than calculating your usage in GB (of course, if slots and bitrate are limited then so is bandwidth - it's just worked out differently to normal hosting)

I'd recommend staying away from stream hosts that offer "unlimited slots" as these are normally scams and as soon as you use more than about 10Mbps they will close your account.

It sounds like you probably need a dedicated server - the best thing to do would be to contact a few stream hosts and see if they offer dedicated servers, that will be better than getting one yourself as the stream host will be able to install everything you need to stream.

PS, for that amount of bandwidth, it won't be cheap unless you use lower quality bandwidth which can result in buffering.

[SSHocker]

Originally Posted by levavie

This is cheaper then my current host - 150$ - 200$ per 500 slots is less then 40% - but as long as the billing is done per slot it's still not scalable. P2P (like the open-source 'p2p radio' software) seems like an interesting option, if quality is enough.

Im sure if you have the $$ they can provide you with as many slots as you need.

Have a look through some of the offers here http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=132 and do some research on hosts before signing up.