You could put a CDN in front of the static content (the videos are likely 99% of YouTube's bandwidth), and you could use Heroku for serving the few kilobytes of HTML.

> You could put a CDN in front of the static content

Most are still way more expensive than dedicated server traffic and "fixed price" CDNs like Cloudflare are going to give you the boot if you serve >100TB on their 20 bucks plan and/or a lot of larger files.

Thanks for the suggestion. Currently I am just running the hosting off of a Backblaze B2 account. It's still super cheap right now, if it ever gets expensive I will definitely look into a VPS or Dedicated Server, but hopefully there will be a pretty solid community around the NodeTube source at that point.

Would it be possible to offload the majority of the traffic using some P2P protocol for videos, like webRTC?

You could use WebTorrent which is P2P in the browser, the issue is exposing people's public IP addresses which I really don't like, so I would never run it in prod unless it was a user opt-in, but not a big priority for me at the moment.

And then it would become peertube https://joinpeertube.org

Heroku has an ephemeral filesystem I'm not sure how you would really serve content from Heroku. Better is to use a service like BackBlaze to host. 2000 GB -> 20$/month using their service.

Why is it a "soft limit"? Are you allowed to go over it under certain circumstances?

Hetzner have true unlimited bandwidth on their dedicated servers :)

Nothing is unlimited.

In theory if you can completely saturate the 1 gbit link for a whole month it's 300TB/month

nice catch

Yeah, "unrestricted" is a better term here.

If something is not unlimited in theory, but it is unlimited in practice, then it is unlimited.

The amount of electricity on Earth is not unlimited so at the end of the day there is a literal limit to the amount of data that can be transferred but for the purposes of advertising the product it's fair to describe the bandwidth as unlimited since what we're trying to do is inform the customer so they can make a purchasing decision :)

Do you have a dedicated server provider you can recommend?

Hetzner offers dedicated servers that basically have unrestricted traffic amounts. You can see the pricing here: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver

This is what they write about their "unlimited traffic":

> Traffic usage is unlimited and free of charge. Please note that our unlimited traffic policy does not apply to servers that have the 10G uplink addon.

Would Hetzner be a good choice for hosting a site with mostly US-based visitors?

If I got a 1Gbps Hetzner server would I be able to serve 1Gbps to the US?

I have 3 Hetzner "1 Gbps" servers in my fleet right now, and my experience is that you're only going to get about 50% of that bandwidth reliably to any place in the world (I suspect they secretly capped me, considering how exactly each server keeps hovering around that number).

They're still a good deal at that price point though.

A server provider that delivered on exactly what they're selling has been online.net, though they ramped up their prices recently. When they sell you X Mbit/s amount of "premium" bandwidth, you're always going to get at least that. If you exceed it a lot they'll cap you to exactly that though. I used to have 8 dedicated servers with them at ~30 Euro/month (excl. taxes) each for a total of ~3Gbit/s bandwidth.

I've had some complaints about download speeds by users from NA when using German-based providers and significantly less complaints when using servers in France (i.e. online.net) or elsewhere west of Germany. I cap download speeds at 3MB/s per user anyways though.

Though beggars can't be choosers. I buy any cheap bandwidth offers I see.

Another thing to look out for if you're planning to saturate 1Ggbit/s is using SSDs and/or a good amount (>=32GB) of RAM. You'll probably not manage to do that if you have 1TB worth of files on a HDD and 8GB RAM for your OS's page cache. If you're planning to use SSL to serve stuff make sure your CPU isn't super old or an Intel Atom or something (I tried having a fleet of a lot of mini dedis once...).

I should write a blog post about all this and more at some point. Maybe next year?

So bandwidth from Hetzner to USA isn't any worse than to Europe? In both cases you're getting about 500 Mbps for a 1 Gbps server?

> I should write a blog post about all this and more at some point. Maybe next year?

Please do. I'd be interested to read more about your experiences.

> So bandwidth from Hetzner to USA isn't any worse than to Europe?

Europe is always going to be better by some margin.

And, as I said, I've had some complaints with German-based providers (like Hetzner) from users in NA. Not enough to be a serious consideration though when weighted against cost.

I'd definitely be interested in reading that.

Hetzner is about 100ms from the US east coast, which is doable. Closer to 200-225ms from the US west coast, which takes quite a bit more effort to deliver a good user experience. You'd probably want a secondary west coast datacenter/CDN.

That said, architecting your application so that all the small, latency-sensitive data was served from a CDN and all the bulk data was served from Hetzner would be a good/affordable option.

OVH is also nice. Some pretty cheap servers in both Virginia and Oregon.

Have also used OVH before, awesome company and great value.