Self-hosting video content is either not very simple, or not very featureful.

You can put an html video tag and call it a day, but you'll be missing out on using the best codec for each viewer and bandwidth adaptation and (last I looked, hopefully I'm wrong) usable UI.

Bandwidth is an issue, although I've seen enough high bandwidth, unmetered server offers that I think it might work. Depending on where your viewers are and where you find cheap bandwidth, you might get poor performance just from distance, whereas YouTube and Facebook have CDNs with nodes everywhere.

Meanwhile there is nothing that matches the efficiency of torrents. I got some nice feedback from putting a magnet under the embed. People said: 1) I wanted to keep the video. 2) I seed it to support it as an upvote. 3) My computer is to shit to play embedded videos. 4) I bookmark your videos (and website) in my torrent client.

A seriously crappy PC, poor bandwidth an some noisy old disks is enough to host 5 TB+

If you even have a few thousand people regularly watching you (whcih is common these days). The bandwidth costs start to add up.

Bandwidth is the easy part for most cases. The software/operations requirements and the network effects are huge and crushing.

Not really. Good dedicated servers come with multiple TB free = 1000x 1 GB stream. And usually it's only pennies afterwards.

I've got experience for US hosting and they dont have great package prices like you're describing after the initial cap ime. 20 TB as some of the biggest caps then your bill is nearly doubled for 20 more. After that your bill would skyrocket to >$1000 in the increased networking fees and you dont even want to know how much unmetered 1+Gbps will get you. This will vary of course because short of being a hosting or tech company of size its not worth the cost, paperwork, biometrics, and time it takes.

So you go for a reseller which there are many stellar ones but they'll either utilize a program with the datacenter akin to an reseller affiliate program with them being the 3rd party support or do it all themselves. If they do the reseller affiliate program they cant really offer anything outside of theie markups on the existing offerings by the datacenter. If they do it all themselves then it becomes much more expensive for the upfront costs.

What you want is a VPS and a CDN which provides a better experience and what every streaming platform uses. Not that expensive either!

Without a CDN, the streaming experience is going to suck for anyone outside of the geographic proximity of your dedicated server

Where? Most place seem to get quite expensive once you add a Object Storage on top.

Hetzner $50+ servers have 1gbps uplink with unmetered BW.

That means the link can support less than 100 viewers at once on a video with 10 Mbps bitrate. Often a large portion of views comes in the first few days of a video being posted. You could probably handle the spike of views from a video that receives a couple of thousand views total (maybe even 10k), but more than that seems difficult.

Also, is Hetzner actually unmetered or do they claim they are with an asterisk?

I think it's actually asterisked. Iirc you get flagged over a certain amount of traffic, but I can't remember if they cut you off or just force you to pay more. I think it was several TB last time I looked.

There was limits before, but last two+ years it's unmetered without asterisk.

replying to Aerroon but it was too deep so replying here.

Is there a way to do it with some p2p à la popcorntime?

Then if there was a surge, the peers could absorb some of it.

Does peertube do that?

Peertube do exactly this. Webtorrent support it's main feature so you dont actually need powerful server for spikes in popularity.

Thanks I will take a look.

excellent compromise!

other replies mention the client compatibility, quality and bandwidth issues with self hosting but i think this can be reasonably adressed with just going for a common denominator on the self-hosting side (eg. 720p h264)