When Vimeo realizes your channel is using too much bandwidth
youtube.com
youtube.com
* He has 4,000 videos on his guitar website behind a paywall, paying $400/yr (Business Plan)
* His plan offers 5TB of storage, he uses 1.3 TB (from memory).
* Vimeo does not give users access to bandwidth stats.
* He was told he has exceeded some unpublished threshold for 13 months and his account will be shutdown if it exceeds it again.
* He was offered a contract and given 7 days to sign it for $5000/yr and his account would not be shutdown during this period.
On the pricing page Vimeo claims unlimited bandwidth for the $50/month Business plan:
"Unlimited bandwidth (subject to fair use)" and when you mouseover it, a popup says "Users in the top 1% of monthly bandwidth usage (99% of Vimeo users never reach this threshold), may be charged for excessive usage".
So it seems 1% of users are forced into custom contracts that exceed the highest published tier of pricing. I would have expected some additional chargers for exceeding some threshold, not increasing the monthly cost by 13x.
The part you mentioned about stats and info being opaque and then out of nowhere you are blocked out of your account resonates with my experience as well.
So what other places exist to post videos?
Digital Ocean? https://www.digitalocean.com/solutions/streaming/
- videos encoded as these chunks in any cdn you find a good deal. I am using Bunny CDN and it's working quite well (but don't use their ftp 'home' storage, host on S3 and serve it from there since their ftp has abysmal upload speeds -- but if it serves you try it tho, their local storage for content is as cheap as 0,01USD/gb in the Falkestein zone)
We didn't want to split the origin and CDN, so we switched to Google storage. Vastly more expensive though.
We provide automatic import from Vimeo and conversion of the embeds as well with just a javascript snippet. And our pricing ends up being about 10-50% of the cost of what Vimeo is trying to push.
One of those time where having the right features at the right time has made it easy for people to get out of this Vimeo battle against their top customers.
I hate, hate, hate it when companies claim this, including mobile phone companies. Unlimited means unlimited. The who "Subject to fair use" is just a bullshit way of trying to say that the usage is actually NOT unlimited.
It's like getting a job at a company and they say that they will pay you $500,000 per year. But then they say that the compensation is subject to fair use, and then they start paying you $40,000 per year.