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Comment by brk | Hacker News Reader

Committed bandwidth can be had in many datacenters these days for around $50/Mbs ($50 for every 1Mbps of committed bandwidth). Or you can do 95th percentile burstable bandwidth as well (or combine the two ($100/mo for 2Mbs plus ~$100 for every 1Mbs over 2Mbps, billed 95th percentile)).

About $400/mo for a half cabinet and some power. You're in the neighborhood of probably $500-$900/mo.

Why colocation instead of some shared or pseudo-dedicated server some place? Because (IMO and IME) you're better off with any site that is going to do streaming and potential sustained throughput in colo facility with fixed costs. Places like Rackspace just love when you go 10x over their pitiful limits and your $200 monthly plan is suddenly $4000. Kind of hard to budget for.

Of course, I'm also biased, having an interest in a colo facility :)

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> About $400/mo for a half cabinet and some power. You're in the neighborhood of probably $500-$900/mo.

And that doesn't even factor in buying a server if it's a colo. Which is exactly why he should be renting a dedicated and buying bandwidth at $10-$20/Mbit. It doesn't make sense to setup your own rack unless you're going to have more than a few machines. It's more expensive and a lot more work.

If you're talking about providing a high capacity and quality experience then there's no alternative to colo.

I think the /Mbps prices quoted are a bit on the high side (you can get cheap transit at 5GBP/Mbps if you deal in reasonable commits). Apart from dropping your own line in there's no cheaper way I know of to achieve the quality.

Use of a CDN would allow less capital outlay on the standard http hosting (could use dedis, vm, cloud) and somewhat instant scalability. Once you know your traffic patterns your implementation options sometimes get made for you.

Yes, the prices were a bit high. They're very regional (and depend on what carriers are at a given site, etc), so I was trying to give a decent average, erring towards worst case (my own prices in MA are a good bit lower, but I'm not trying to troll for customers on HN).

Good point on the CDN, "streaming" can sometimes be non-CDN compatible (although "CDN" is a wide ranging term).

Were it me, I'd start with an $800 1U box in a decent colo somewhere. Add another one on the opposite coast when the first started to get above 50% utilization and then scale from there.

Going colo can be worth it when you need serious hardware but for 800$ / month you can pick up:

Four of these: Xeon 3210 - SATA 250 GB IDE/SATA HDD 2 GB 2000 GB 5 IPs $199.00

Or one of these ~Dual Xeon 2.8, 8 x 300 GB 10K RPM SCSI/SAS HDD 2 x 73 GB 10K RPM SCSI/SAS HDD 8 GB RAM 3000 GB Bandwidth 5 IPs $799.00

Which can take a lot of traffic. IMO Colo is great when you want to use lots of heavy duty HW and little bandwidth but for front end web servers you need a lot of traffic before it's reasonable.

" It's more expensive and a lot more work."

Until your site goes viral, quashes your "dedicated" server (or the providers upstream bandwidth) and your customers are met with some fail-whale variant.

Use a rented server to get off the ground and get the prototype out there, but don't try to build a backbone on that model. Especially when you're going to be doing streaming, your uptime IS your product, renting a server is like trying to start a livery service by going to Avis every morning and renting a car each day. It will work great, until it doesn't, and you're left scrambling.

> Until your site goes viral, quashes your "dedicated" server (or the providers upstream bandwidth) and your customers are met with some fail-whale variant.

Most sites don't "go viral". A reasonably powerful dedicated server can handle serving an incredible number of requests for static content. Any good host (like ServerBeach) is going to have far more bandwidth to spare than what you're running to your own rack. They can also give you additional servers in an hour or two in an emergency. Far more quickly than you can buy and install your own.

Using dedicated servers these days is not like it was in the past. Servers are far more powerful and bandwidth is far cheaper. One beefy server can do what a dozen older generation machines could do. That 40 server rack in 2001 is a couple dedicated servers in 2008. For me, at least.

all valid points. The poster might also want to consider using a CDN if it's single request streaming files, otherwise colo as you said.

whatever you choose make sure it can scale fast, but at the same time (depending on your presentation of the media), there's always the option of piggybacking on someone else (like youtube) who's made the infrastructure investment.

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