
Ask HN: Clever ways to run a media-heavy website on a budget? - wild_preference
I&#x27;ve been taking a break from working to relax and visit some friends in a few countries. So I don&#x27;t have a lot of money, but with my newfound free time, I&#x27;ve been inspired to take a shot at a few ideas I&#x27;ve always wanted to build.<p>One idea is particularly media heavy. I have 5+ TB of media that I&#x27;d like to build something around.<p>Services like S3 are pretty expensive, especially bandwidth. Backblaze has been trying to market their storage solution (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.backblaze.com&#x2F;b2&#x2F;cloud-storage-pricing.html) against S3.<p>But I can get even cheaper by using low quality hardware and bandwidth like Kimsufi&#x27;s 2TB machines for $10&#x2F;mo (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kimsufi.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;servers.xml).<p>Does anyone have another ideas for stretching a dollar?
======
heipei
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.

~~~
teamhappy
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).

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

~~~
teamhappy
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.)

------
zawerf
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.

~~~
wild_preference
That's probably exactly what I should do.

~~~
3stripe
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.

~~~
3stripe
PS. [http://silversuit.net/blog/2016/04/how-to-set-up-a-
practical...](http://silversuit.net/blog/2016/04/how-to-set-up-a-practically-
free-cdn/) ... 5tb on Backblaze B2 = $25/month

------
SXX
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](https://robot.your-
server.de/order/market)

~~~
tudorconstantin
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.

~~~
zorked
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.

~~~
imhoguy
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](https://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1200617)

------
indigodaddy
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.

~~~
pnutjam
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](https://billing.time4vps.eu/?affid=1881)

------
DDR0
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](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.

~~~
voltagex_
And what if your users are charged for upstream bandwidth?

~~~
solarkraft
That's

a. Unlikely, where have you seen this before?

b. A reasonable price to view the page.

~~~
AzMoo_
Uploads are metered on loads of Internet plans in Australia.

~~~
voltagex_
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)

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

That puts 5TB storage at $24/mo.

~~~
jazoom
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.

~~~
voltagex_
"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."

~~~
jazoom
Thank you

------
ahofmann
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.

~~~
Svenstaro
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.

------
hunvreus
Cloudflare is free: CDN the heck out of it.

~~~
scrollaway
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...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/01/using-immutable-
caching-to-speed-up-the-web/)

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.

~~~
SXX
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...](https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-
us/articles/200394750-What-s-the-maximum-file-size-CloudFlare-will-cache-)

------
merkaloid
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.

------
phasecode
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.

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

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

~~~
joshribakoff
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

------
krewast
How about Contabo?
[https://contabo.com/?show=vps](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?

~~~
nwellnhof
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.

------
vbezhenar
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.

------
simonpure
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.

------
seeekr
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.

~~~
scottybowl
Sounds similar to fly.io

~~~
seeekr
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.

------
joshribakoff
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

~~~
CodeWriter23
I believe you mean super cheap Object storage. Their block storage is
$0.10/GB/Mo. which is pretty much the going rate.

------
Geee
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.

------
dawnerd
I have a server from here:
[https://www.nocix.net/dedicated/](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.

------
xstartup
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.

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

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

~~~
kondro
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

------
megamindbrian2
You could transcode with VLC/Elastic Transcoder and store that in the cloud
until an individual file is requested.

------
rocky1138
Your description doesn't include enough information. My first thoughts were to
create a torrent.

------
mozumder
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.

~~~
icebraining
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.

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

------
LifeLiverTransp
[https://www.quora.com/Can-P2P-real-time-streaming-video-
be-s...](https://www.quora.com/Can-P2P-real-time-streaming-video-be-
successful)

Make your users your servers..

------
chx
Write up more precisely of how much bandwidth, storage and CPU you need and
post to [https://www.lowendtalk.com/](https://www.lowendtalk.com/)

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

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

------
squid3
Nodechef provides a lot more for startups and budgets of any size.
[https://nodechef.com/](https://nodechef.com/)

------
z3t4
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.

~~~
cascada
How will Bittrorent help here?

~~~
z3t4
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.

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

~~~
wolco
That's only 25g of storage

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

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

------
alex621101
Linode $5 server + cloudflare for free

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

------
postit
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.

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

------
mkj
Could you use better compression?

------
tehlike
What is your bw requirement?

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

------
senatorobama
Illegal streaming?

~~~
lev99
I was thinking porn.

------
pnutjam
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.

------
loganekz
s3 with cloudfront

[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/Develope...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/MigrateS3ToCloudFront.html)

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

~~~
CodeWriter23
Definitely hide whatever you implement behind CloudFlare.

