Serving video files from another webserver

Archives rtMedia
#1

A somewhat unusual question, but here goes!

Main Webserver has a 100Mbps network card, and we’re peaking it rather often at 90-95Mbps. This is beginning to cause slowdowns for our members. The root cause of the problem is serving video files. Generally about 100-120 people are viewing videos at any given moment.

Using rtMedia Pro, and rtMedia’s ffmpeg plugin for the encoding on our server.

I’d like to buy a second webserver – only to host video files on, nothing more. I dont care which server does the encoding. All I want is the completed videos on another server and then for the new server to serve the video files, and the current main server to serve the WordPress pages.

Any ideas on the best way to accomplish this?

Thanks!

#2

FFMPEG plugin sends videos back to WordPress. So any plugin which works with WordPress media library should work with your videos. If it doesn’t please report an issue and we will fix coding issue, if any, with highest priority.

About solutions, you may try…

Origin-Pull CDN

A simple CDN like Amazon Cloudfront. That way CDN service will download file from your servers one and rest of the users can watch it from CDN only.

CDN will reduce latency for end-user as well.

Pros: Easy to setup. CDN bandwidth is cheaper e.g. cdn77.com and cdn.net

Amazon S3

Video will be transferred to Amazon S3 and will be hosted there. Amazo S3 cost more but you can use Amazon Cloudfront with it.

Another server

As per your requirements, you may add a dedicated server to host files. W3 Total Cache plugin has an option where it uploads files to other server using FTP and then rewrite “file” paths.

I will not recommend last one. The cost of dedicated server may seem less, but end user experience is best with CDN.

If cost is concern (which is common for video delivery), try cdn.net where you can choose edge locations. It can cost as less as $30/TB (without any commitment to use minimum bandwidth)

Please let me know your feedback. We really like to solve problem like this! :smile:

#3

Thanks @rahul286 – I had never considered W3 for its CDN purposes. Great tip! I looked at the paid CDN’s, and their prices would heavily put the community in bankrupcy. :wink: It’s a video sharing site, and as a result we have about 300GB of videos for 15,000 individual videos to see. With about 150,000 pageviews a day, it’s not a super huge site, it just takes up some bandwidth. (50-75Mbps continually).

I think the best route will be the non recommended path – a second server setup as cdn.domain.com and only serve mp4 files from that server.

A second server would alleviate the main servers 100Mbps network card limitation, free up some resources, and allow a second server for about $99/month to serve all the videos via cdn.domain.com.

Sound OK? Thanks so much for your detailed reply!

Ben

#4

I understand your needs. :smile:

CDN will cost a lot more in your case!

I will recommend using a dedicated server with bigger port:

Some examples:

http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/enterprise/ http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/hosting/ http://www.ovh.com/us/dedicated-servers/infra/

All of above has guaranteed 500mbps and starts from $109/month ($10 extra).

OVH has too many options so look for maximum CPU core (2nd factor). After bandwidth, second bottleneck would be CPU.

Also, depending on your total storage need, you may opt for SSD only server. (unless it cost way more).

You may also have a look at - http://www.hetzner.de/en/ for some more options.

We use OVH but heard good things about hetzner also. :smile:

By the way glad to know you are running such a big site on rtMedia. We will be happy to assist you in whatever way possible.

#5