Your vps is perfectly fine so long as you're not serving traffic in China, India, etc. If you need to push data globally, need to handle very peaky traffic above the throughput of one machine, or need to have 99.9999% uptime, a cdn will look attractive.

An analog for me is car repair. I could take my car in to get oil changes, have brakes serviced, etc. etc. Disregarding the money I save the reason I don't use those services is because those technicians and companies do not care about the quality of their work on my property as much as I do.

As an example, I was feeling too lazy to do a radiator replacement myself and so I took it to a big shop. Terrible mistake, when I got the car back they'd unplugged some of the sparkplug wires and forgot to plug one back in. There's no way they didn't notice the rough idling when moving it out of the bay. Even worse they wanted to say nothing was wrong until I had them pop the hood and pointed out the spark plug boot just sitting there.

Edit: To expand on this, the answer isn't buy a CDN solution. The answer is make CDN solutions so easy to implement that anyone can setup their own with their own hardware hosted in colos around the world.

... update their CNAMEs to point at a different company's CDN or a different video serving platform, and wait for the DNS to propagate

To me at least, the risk of a CDN or a video hosting service going bad or pulling your content is mostly the same risk as "colos around the world" going bad or pulling your content. Possibly a lower risk for most people - the chance of Cloudfront/Cloudflare/Akamai or AWS/Azure/GCE going broke or shutting you down is quite a lot lower than the risk of other smaller colo providers and your own hardware going dark. There's probably a smaller gap between smaller CDNs and cloud compute providers compared to rolling your own - but for most use cases I'd guess having a "cloud agnostic' design and ability to switch compute and CDN resources quickly and easily is a lower effort and more reliable way to reduce existential risk to your business.

I'm sure there are businesses who's risk estimates don't match mine - Darknet Markets for sure, probably "adult content" as well (given the observed puritanical zeal some of that industry gets deplatformed with). But for most clients and projects I've worked on in the 15-ish years since "Cloud services" became mainstream, owning hardware and leasing colo space would have been a totally misplaced cost/risk optimisation.(And I say that as someone wo used to do 2 or 3 trips a year from Sydney to colo facilities in the US and the UK with my luggage filled up with pre-loaded harddrives and toolkits to screw them into servers we owned on both US coasts and in London. I kinda miss the travel a bit, but I _totally_ prefer being able to get my phone out and provision new cloud "hardware" instead of hoping i had enough hot spare capacity somewhere, and ordering new hardware and plane tickets to fix disasters...)

Building your own infrastructure is like living "off the grid" with a wind turbine and a well and a composting toilet. You might have mitigated some risks but let's not pretend that there isn't an enormous cost in doing so.

And your infrastructure still isn't really literally "off the grid" of course. It's dependent on colos, network providers, etc. Sure, there's far, far less of a single point of failure than using YouTube but you're always going to be dependent on others to some degree.

Further, no one has the time or the money to do everything ourselves. To the upstream comment, I have neither the time or the energy to take on car maintenance. I have other things to do even if it means I spend more money and sometimes the shop doesn't do an optimum job. I'm not going to criticize someone who wants to do things themselves, but you have to choose.

Has had more uptime than Cloudflare.

FYI:

"An existential risk is any risk that has the potential to eliminate all of humanity or, at the very least, kill large swaths of the global population, leaving the survivors without sufficient means to rebuild society to current standards of living."

Source: https://futureoflife.org/background/existential-risk

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_catastrophic_risk

> I could easily

> I can stream 4K without...

Of course that depends on your users too. You have one connection point to the wider Internet and differing peering arrangements might many some (or possibly many) can't access your resources that fast even if you can serve them that fast as far as your provider's egress points.

Those outrageously priced public clouds and CDNs likely have greater global peering arrangements that will vastly best a cheap VPS for a lot of uses. They also offer availability guarantees, bandwidth guarantees that a cheap VPS will never offer (that 10gbit bandwidth will be "up to" on a shared pipe), and other potentially significant considerations.

> I've never had a user complain, so it works.

Of course if all your users are in topologically convenient locations so they can pull content from that one VPS at a good rate, you don't see sufficient concurrent access (or don't at times other users of the providers' bandwidth are) such that the lack of bandwidth guarantees are not an issue, then you do have the right tool for your job. But this is far from a one-size-fits-all business.

(though of course if a user just goes elsewhere without complaining, how would you know?)

I see on their website you can upgrade to 10gbit metered for an extra $2/month but I don't know what they'd charge for the unmetered options now.

There are lots and lots of providers if you are happy with 1gbit unmetered though: I'm a happy customer of BuyVM (starting from less than $2 a month!) and Scaleway (bandwidth depends on your plan).

If you are happy to spend a bit more for your own dedicated box, OVH, Hertzner, Online.net are great options. All of them offer unmetered BW I believe.

I don't remember if this is on a dedicated box or a VPS, but IIRC it was dedicated and the VPS has a 3 TB/mo limit.

It's a pretty good solution, but not perfect. I have heard that some people have trouble watching content, most likely due to peering between Germany and the US.

There's no transcoding options for the end-users since I'm already hosting 1 TB of content and there's not really room to keep different versions. Mostly not a big deal for my users but it's probably not helping with the connectivity issues.

I've considered other options but there's really nothing that can beat this setup when it comes to price performance. Serving a terabyte of content for 25 euro a month is pretty unbeatable. I recently had a 24 hours period where the server pushed out like 1.06 TB of traffic. This kind of bandwidth would be killing my wallet otherwise. And since this is a non-profit project, I'm eating all of the costs.