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Ask HN: Clever ways to run a media-heavy website on a budget?
181 points by wild_preference on April 8, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 97 comments
I've been taking a break from working to relax and visit some friends in a few countries. So I don't have a lot of money, but with my newfound free time, I've been inspired to take a shot at a few ideas I've always wanted to build.

One idea is particularly media heavy. I have 5+ TB of media that I'd like to build something around.

Services like S3 are pretty expensive, especially bandwidth. Backblaze has been trying to market their storage solution (https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html) against S3.

But I can get even cheaper by using low quality hardware and bandwidth like Kimsufi's 2TB machines for $10/mo (https://www.kimsufi.com/en/servers.xml).

Does anyone have another ideas for stretching a dollar?



Can also recommend Hetzner. You've got different options.

Go for a regular (or even Cloud) server and get a Storage Box on top. 5TB Storage Box would be €26/mo.

You can also get a server with 2x3TB or 2x4TB for around €40-€50, either a new one or a used one from their bidding page. Good thing about Hetzner is that you don't pay extra for bandwidth, so the pricing is very easy and predictable.

online.net has similar offers in a similar price-range.


I recommend Hetzner too, but I want to point out that traffic is not free. When you exceed the included traffic (something like 20-50TB IIRC) your connection gets throttled unless you pay 1,2-1,4€/TB.

That's a good thing though. Traffic does cost money and all those providers offering unlimited traffic will start emailing you once you generate significant amounts of traffic anyway.

Edit: Just to put that into perspective (since most people here are talking about the price of the server). If you buy a affordable server for 30-40€/month and you saturate the 1gbit/s NIC 24/7 you end up paying over 450€/month. If you buy a more expensive server (75€/month, 50TB traffic included, 1,19€/TB extra traffic) you save at least 100€/month. I guess what I'm saying is worry about the price of the traffic not the price of the server.

Edit2: My math is all wrong. Anyway if you need lots of traffic buy their regular servers instead of the auctioned ones, you will save money (more like 50+€/month, but still).


Which block storage solution do you use on those Herzners servers? Or are you directly using file system?


File system. The prices for Hetzner's cloud seem to be the same: 20TB traffic included and 1,19€/TB on top of that. (That's super cheap by the way.)


On Hetzner, it looks like the amount of free traffic is dependent on the server's monthly cost: https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Traffic/en


I don't recommend this, but if your media are images, some really large manga sites (kissmanga.com, a top 500 site in the US according to alexa) have been using blogger.com to host from Google Album Archive for years now and still haven't been shut down. They are probably pushing hundreds of terabytes in bandwidth per month for free.


That's probably exactly what I should do.


Does that mean your ‘media’ is image-based?

Please tell us some more about your idea.. cos if it’s video, much of the below is moot.


PS. http://silversuit.net/blog/2016/04/how-to-set-up-a-practical... ... 5tb on Backblaze B2 = $25/month


One of cheapest options with 20TB+ of free bandwidth would be Hetzner auction. These servers might be not super reliable, but they don't have setup fee and still capable of serving your files:

https://robot.your-server.de/order/market


I am using hetzner for about 5 years and had absolutely no problem with them.

I am paying 30 EUR/month for a machine with an older generation i7 CPU, 24 GB of RAM, 2x750 GB HDD and 20TB of monthly traffic. The price is close to the electricity cost if I were to host the machine in my home. During these 5 years the machine had not a single downtime.

I've read stories that they had lousy tech support, but can't confirm, since I never needed it.

Overall I had a great experience with them so far, so I also recommend them whenever I can.


Another data point: I used to buy servers in Hetzner's auction by the dozens per month. It's very common that the servers will crash and need new HDDs or RAM. I never had a problem with support, but soon learned to treat those servers like cattle: if one is broken, return it and grab a new one.

They are worth it even if you have trouble, though. Just make sure you have a backup plan.


Agree with that. I also advise to avoid machines with i7-3770 there. I had a problem with this CPU and some mobo combination which ended up in random crashes under network/disk load. More evidence here: https://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1200617


Check out BuyVM.net's Storage VPS offerings. Unlimited transfer apparently. Ultra competitive pricing and they don't overprovision. They're well established and quite reputable in the hosting community. Largest disk space offering appears to be 2TB, however if you contact them they might be able to work something up for you.

Note: No affillation, but I've had a few small VPS'es with the. Very reliable shop.


That looks way more expensive then time4vps.eu. I have a storage server with them. THis is my affiliate link, https://billing.time4vps.eu/?affid=1881


How about using something like Websockets to reduce outbound cost? It'll have anyone on the page viewing the media also host the media for their fellow web surfers. If I recall, there is a socket-based bittorrent library floating around somewhere - https://github.com/webtorrent might be a good start. :)

Serve the static web-page files from a decent host. Seed the 5tb of content from the cheap host.


And what if your users are charged for upstream bandwidth?


That's

a. Unlikely, where have you seen this before?

b. A reasonable price to view the page.


Uploads are metered on loads of Internet plans in Australia.


I was thinking more of phone data plans - they're even more limited (although strangely Australia's got some of the best plans at the moment outside of Europe)


Mobile internet plans mostly charge for upstream too. (I'm from Turkey)


Wasabi (S3-compatible) recently released an "Unlimited Egress" plan with unmetered bandwidth: https://wasabi.com/pricing/

That puts 5TB storage at $24/mo.


Worth noting that:

> If your use case creates an unreasonable burden on our infrastructure, we reserve the right to limit your egress traffic and/or ask you to switch to our Legacy pricing plan. Wasabi’s hot cloud storage service is not designed to be used to serve up (for example) web pages at a rate where the downloaded data far exceeds the stored data or any other use case where a small amount of data is served up a large amount of times.

https://wasabi.com/pricing/pricing-faqs/


Do you have any idea where their datacentres are?

They claim they're 6x faster than S3 but I'll bet it's 20 times slower with latency unless they have a Sydney datacentre.

You'd think this is info they'd put somewhere findable on their website.


"Wasabi is deployed in fully secure and redundant data centers that are certified for SOC-2, ISO 27001, and PCI-DSS. Our primary production data center is in the us-east region and additional data centers in other regions will be activated soon. Please contact us if you have specific questions in this area."


Thank you


Hetzner has already been mentioned, I just want to add that traffic is effectively free with most German providers. Good German providers are Hosteurope, Manitu, strato, 1und1. server4you, 1blu and others are particularly cheap German providers, but I have no experience with them.


My experience from a few years ago shows that one should stay away from strato and server4you. They only seem cheap on the surface. Goo luck if you need actual support.


server4you got sold to Hosteurope,

Hosteurope got sold to GoDaddy and they moved most of their servers from colonge to france, no problems so far.

i would not recommend strato and 1und1, everything is fine unless its not and nobody picks up the phone

no experience with manitu so far

ip-projects.de - good host and good customer service

netcup.eu - good host for smaller projects


Cloudflare is free: CDN the heck out of it.


This very much. You can also save all your media with content hashes in their filename, then tell cloudflare to "always permanently cache" everything behind a certain path using a page rule.

I have a site set up like that which serves over 1TB monthly and <5GB of it actually goes through to S3. (And obviously you don't have to use s3 to back it, you can use anything)

Bonus points: If you do it this way you can also use immutable caching for clientside savings. More info: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/01/using-immutable-caching-to...

This may be dependent on how large your media is however. 5TB sounds like it could be large videos, so some of this may not apply to you. I don't know how well Cloudflare caches videos.


Any evidence that Cloudflare will cache even fraction of his 5TB on free plan? While I personally have sites where like 20GB of images were cached on free tier I truly don't expect them to cache as much as even 1TB.

> I don't know how well Cloudflare caches videos.

It's cache files only under 512MB:

https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200394750-W...


CF does a good job caching, if you do a good job segmenting.

Here's a screen cast I did a while back exploring HLS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9TJuWT5sNM&t=6m27s


Does Cloudflare cache everything no matter how much you feed it? You said <5GB goes through to S3 so that is from the total 1TB of data?


They have a history of randomly deciding it's not free and shutting off people's service without notice. It also slows down your site (cache misses)


Not so randomly - they seem to shut down sites that take the CDN freeloading to an extreme - image hotlinks, lots of data with not HTML, that kind of thing. If the entire site is being served via CF, they might not mind. They do have a video service in the works, though, need to see how that pans out.


What about a site with a little HTML but lots of files. "Might not mind" doesn't sound like something I would bet my business on. There is a gray area and you can find examples of people that got shut down (without warning) whom would disagree that they crossed that line


Get a paid plan if you’re a business or are serious about your site. Don’t think they take unilateral action on paid plans. There’s also an option to pay for bandwidth somewhere, there certainly is when you activate Argo. Can’t really accuse you of free loading once you pay.


In case Cloudflare's free plan is not enough, I'd suggest going for proven low cost providers such as CDN77, KeyCDN or MaxCDN.


Get Cloudflare and aggressively cache your data. I've seem them eat dozens of TBs of data on the free plan without complaining that you're using too much bandwidth on a free plan.


Store your files in backblaze then proxy them through some cheap vps (to cover bandwidth) and add local cache through something like nginx so you're not going to the source frequently.


Some hints: ovh is good for eu/(northern) us (loadbalancing ip + vps behind it to spread load - be prepared to ditch vps if you're getting horrible performance), scaleway if you can live with just eu Probably as cheap as it gets from big providers

Obviously going to have to compromise (round robin dns > ~1gbps, self managed stuff), but thats just expected If it's just images probably just go with cloudflare


Can make byte range requests a bit complicated and slows down your site when there's cache misses


Use the slice command in nginx and $slice_range your cache key ;)


I'm not asking for advice I'm stating it does technically complicate your setup. What if two people request overlapping ranges concurrently etc... it is more moving parts to setup, test and administer


How about Contabo? https://contabo.com/?show=vps

VPS XL: - Six cores - 30 GB RAM - 2000 GB Storage - 1 Gbit/s port - Unlimited traffic - 19.99 EUR/month

VPS XL SSD: - Ten cores - 50 GB RAM - 1200 GB Storage - 1 Gbit/s port - Unlimited traffic - 26.99 EUR/month

I'm running some personal projects on a VPS M SSD for a few years now and never had a problems. They are based in Munich, Germany.

Side note: I probably wouldn't recommend them for high availability, "hard core" production stuff but if you are on a budget and just want to try something out, why not?


From the footnotes: "Unlimited traffic: No additional costs due to traffic, you can use 100 Mbit/s without any bandwidth restrictions or throttling. (Only in case your server has a 1 Gbit/s uplink: If average traffic consumption continuously exceeds 100 Mbit/s over a timespan of at least 9 days the connection is switched to 100 Mbit/s)."

An average of 100 Mbit/s means ~32 TB/month.


Interesting, never heard of them. Thanks for sharing...


I have home connection with 300 Mb/s and server for a few hundreds of bucks. I can easily host terabytes of things. You could do the same. It's not scalable in terms of bandwidth (I could buy 1 Gb/s for few more bucks, but that's limit) or not the most reliable service (though I had 0 unexpected downtime for the last months), but might do the trick while you don't have much money and if your idea will be profitable, you could move to the cloud.


I'd also consider serving the files from your broadband connection and use various caching techniques to limit hitting your home server such as IPFS, Cloudflair, browser caching and other p2p approaches.

Alternatively, if it's video, you could also upload it to YouTube as unlisted and serve it embedded in your page.

We could provide better recommendations if you share more details what the type of data is and how it's intended to be used.


Hetzner for storage and traffic, Scaleway for serving additional traffic for free, to stretch the dollar further. At 5TB you probably don't need anything but the raw file system yet, but if you do want some redundancy you could add something like Gluster on top. I'm building out a video + image processing + CDN-like aspects solution on top of such a setup and plan to offer it as SaaS in the not too distant future. Idea is to make something a lot cheaper (order of magnitude?) than currently exists on the market -- for a lot of ideas and opportunities I come across using any of the non-budget clouds/hosting providers is just not feasible financially.


Sounds similar to fly.io


fly.io is aimed at very different use cases. It is essentially a programmable CDN, and priced like a CDN, too ($0.10/GB traffic). You would not enjoy the bill for trying to serve all of your video content through it, and you also don't get disk-based storage from them, as far as I can tell. They only have memory-based caching, which could be fine for caching the hottest of the hottest of your video (or images), but for anything else paying $6 for 100MB of cache, or $60 per GB per month, would make for insane costs.


cheaper than vimeo ?


Vimeo is not an appropriate solution for the use cases that I have in mind. I don't think Vimeo would be fine with serving dozens of TBs of traffic for you, or storing many TBs of video content. Vimeo is aimed at professionals and companies who use video as basically a marketing tool, or communication tool, or who produce very little but very high quality video that may be shown to lots or few people. But it's not meant to be something like a platform for you to build something like your own Vimeo/Youtube, where your users upload (lots of) video and also consume lots of it. Case in point: Their "business" offering website speaks about a total of 5 TB of max video storage that you get, and you get tools from Vimeo to manage that video manually. But if you're building a video platform then you need APIs first and foremost, as well as basically unlimited video storage, ie. pay by use or similar.

But if you still want to compare apples and oranges here -- yes, cheaper, or at least comparable in price, just aimed at a different (much larger scale) use case.


Digital ocean has super cheap block storage and currently has no way to track bandwidth usage (currently overages are not billed). GlusterFS is also useful. I cut latency in half switching from s3 to glusterFS


I believe you mean super cheap Object storage. Their block storage is $0.10/GB/Mo. which is pretty much the going rate.


What kind of media? You might be able to avoid hosting them on your own servers. If it's video, you can use Youtube. If it's images, use Flickr or something else.


I have a server from here: https://www.nocix.net/dedicated/

Not necessarily the most reliable provider but hard to beat the prices, especially for their larger servers.

Since you said you were working with media, a vps will probably have pretty poor performance if you're doing any transcoding or the such.


Wasabi (s3 API) + Cheap VPS caches + Cloudflare. I would switch to cloudflare paid tiers, if they still don't like you then simply remove Cloudflare from this setup. It should infact be possible to offer this as SaaS where you just need to upload api keys of wasabi, cloudflare, cloud vps providers and your media servers are ready for webscale.


Cloudflare question: when would they start to get mad at you using potentially PBs of bandwidth per month on a free plan?


No. If it's just lots of files & lots of regular users, and you're not running anything illegal/abusive, then it's fine.


It depends what you're doing. If you use us as some kind of file host then that's a ToS violation.


Those TOS are both very restrictive and vague at the same time though.

On one hand specifying that literally only HTML can be hosed through the platform whilst simulataneously suggesting that caching other content is fine, as long as it’s not “disproportionate” (but disproportionate to what?).

“SECTION 10: LIMITATION ON NON-HTML CACHING You acknowledge that Cloudflare’s Service is offered as a platform to cache and serve web pages and websites and is not offered for other purposes, such as remote storage. Accordingly, you understand and agree to use the Service solely for the purpose of hosting and serving web pages as viewed through a web browser or other application and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) protocol or other equivalent technology. Cloudflare’s Service is also a shared web caching service, which means a number of customers’ websites are cached from the same server. To ensure that Cloudflare’s Service is reliable and available for the greatest number of users, a customer’s usage cannot adversely affect the performance of other customers’ sites. Additionally, the purpose of Cloudflare’s Service is to proxy web content, not store data. Using an account primarily as an online storage space, including the storage or caching of a disproportionate percentage of pictures, movies, audio files, or other non-HTML content, is prohibited. You further agree that if, at Cloudflare’s sole discretion, you are deemed to have violated this section, or if Cloudflare, in its sole discretion, deems it necessary due to excessive burden or potential adverse impact on Cloudflare’s systems, potential adverse impact on other users, server processing power, server memory, abuse controls, or other reasons, Cloudflare may suspend or terminate your account without notice to or liability to you


You could transcode with VLC/Elastic Transcoder and store that in the cloud until an individual file is requested.


Your description doesn't include enough information. My first thoughts were to create a torrent.


I use my home ISP with a home server on a static IP address.

My server is something I built myself, and contains about 30TB of media storage (FreeBSD ZFS setup), plus NVMe SSDs for database.

Unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage, and super fast.

Holy crap is it fast.


What's your upload bandwidth? Around here they're 1/10 of the download, so you'd need a pretty expensive plan to serve a heavy website.


Same upload & download. This is on Verizon Business FIOS.


https://www.quora.com/Can-P2P-real-time-streaming-video-be-s...

Make your users your servers..


Write up more precisely of how much bandwidth, storage and CPU you need and post to https://www.lowendtalk.com/


Has anyone successfully run a business from an OpenVZ VPS? I thought those ones, especially the ones on LowEndTalk were massively oversubscribed.


1. You get what you pay for 2. Lowendtalk has a wide spectrum of offers, OpenVZ, KVM, dedis and more.


Nodechef provides a lot more for startups and budgets of any size. https://nodechef.com/


Bittorrent. Or since you got lots of free time, build your own bittorrent-like client like Spotify did, so that bandwidth is spread out between clients.


How will Bittrorent help here?


He will be able to distribute all 5+ TB of media basically for free, and it will scale infinitely. For example with Spotify, music was streaming peeer to peer instead from a central server. Spotify has however gone away from that model, probably because their bandwidth costs are dwarfed by all other expenses like fancy new offices.


1TB for $5/month on digitalocean ain't bad


That's only 25g of storage


If you’re hosting something with enough bandwidth costs to be expensive, you should probably find a business model and monetize it.


Look at DigitalOcean spaces. 250 GB storage, 5TB bandwidth for $5/Month. Works with most S3 compatible sdks already


Linode $5 server + cloudflare for free


A Linode $5 server only has 20GB of storage. OP has 5TB.


I know a guy who once used one flickr pro account as a high res photo storage. He wrote a middleware to upload the photos there and used nginx as a proxy to keep links under his domain.

It was clever until it lasted.


That sounds like a fine idea. What happened to it?


Could you use better compression?


What is your bw requirement?


GSuite + rclone mount for storage + unlimited bandwidth vps. Check out lowendbox.com


Illegal streaming?


I was thinking porn.


That's 9.99 Euro's. I use Time4vps.eu. Their prices are the same, but I have an older plan that was cheaper. They do offer specials occasional as well. I have their 1TB plan for about $15 /quarter.


s3 with cloudfront

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/Develope...


I've actually used that combination before and I would hate for the person that DDoSed me to know how much they cost me.


Definitely hide whatever you implement behind CloudFlare.


That's probably the most expensive route you can go once you have any decent traffic.


What about text content only? This is free SSL with Let's Encrypt but Cloudfare seemingly charges for SSL.

Edit: Seemingly it could be free, but you must manually handle your certs to some degree.

Edit 2: Cloudfront now comes with "AWS Shield Standard" automatically to protect from DDOS?


I think literally the only more expensive option you could’ve suggested is Akamai.




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