Show HN: Nodetube – Open-source YouTube alternative with image and audio uploads
github.com
github.com
They have a soft limit of 2TB traffic/month, so you're probably not gonna get very far on that platform.
I run a very high traffic site on a hobby budget and my experience is that you're probably not gonna get around shopping for dedicated servers. That is if you want 500TB - 1PB of traffic per month to be in any way affordable. Forget AWS, Heroku and all that stuff. They're roughly twenty times (literally) more expensive.
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.
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.
If I got a 1Gbps Hetzner server would I be able to serve 1Gbps to the US?
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
I think there's a good case to be made for multiple federated clients and servers to ensure the health of the ecosystem.
There's 3 reasons why they like Youtube:
1. easy-to-use (free, no administration)
2. discoverability, though large channels already have a built-in audience that is self-viral!
3. monetization, typically $1k - $5k/million views/month (eligible above 10,000 subscribers for acceptable content)
The downsides are:
1. "copyrights", which are mostly Youtube takedowns (seldom DMCA)
2. the sporadic nature of payments. You might get $0 next month, or $1000. Very mysterious, so creators rely on Patreon to pay their rent.
3. Occasionally your comments get disabled, related to "copyrights." Then you have to manually re-enable, which is a hassle for hundreds of videos.
Oh, and your account could be deactivated at any time. :)
Thanks for the reply.
I'd instead focus on differentiation specific to video uploads to attract a niche of YouTube users.
YT is over 10 years old, so they've covered some major ground and solved many infrastructure problems that you haven't. They also have distribution via apps on pretty much every smart device. Between Vimeo and YT, video hosting is arguably a solved problem unless you can find a hard to replicate feature that they can't and is important to a niche of users.
Best of luck, but seriously consider whether you're passionate enough about this project that you will put in the effort to grow it to a point where you've found that niche and users are supporting it in some way to the point where it sufficiently covers your costs and time.
NodeTube also has monetization, livestreaming, lots of epic stuff. Enough interest on Github and this thing will go to the moon in my opinion.
I'm only offering this feedback as someone who has been down a similar path, and I sincerely hope for the success of the project. You're expecting or at least hoping for lightning to strike. Consider the case where if it doesn't and you need to move forward. It's the intellectually honest thing to do, and will cover the most likely scenario.
Something I think would help bring in contributors is an architectural diagram and/or blog post on how the subsystems fit together.
Best of luck to all involved, it won't be easy but it's certainly a worthy goal!
Some people deploy their own Node Tube instances. Each instance has users (creators and viewers) and content (videos, images, comments, etc).
If so, how are NT instances joined together? How does discovery happen? Are users shared between instances? Do you have an about or summary page that answers these and other questions?
Really excited and glad to see YouTube competitors. I think there's a lot of opportunity there. Plus, I watched a video of Bill Gates jumping over a chair and it worked perfectly.
The bigger question to answer: How do you appeal to viewers?
If you want to prevent client storage because you want to create a repeated controllable attention resource, then you will have a scaling problem.
(It's too bad you can distribute everything as a torrent and give people an easy way to pay for the movie they just downloaded, even if it was just "on their honor".)
Thanks guys!
Do they? In my bubble, that's certainly a very uncommon sentiment from the consumer side.
I think part of that is people not recognizing the difference between "I hate this platform, as in I will actually put my money where my mouth is and leave or boycott it at the slightest provocation" and "I hate this platform, as in I grumble about it because pretty much every hugely successful venture has everyone grumbling about one thing or the other, but my net feelings towards it are actually rather positive and I have no intentions of leaving it".
If we ever want to have a better YouTube alternative, I think the main question is would people be willing to pay a good amount of money for that service. Personally, I find the YouTube model better. Even though it tracks people, it atleast makes videos freely accessible to everyone. Would something like khan academy or OCW even exist without YouTube?.
However, I have observed that as one progress through the social ladder economically, the appetite for a paid but non tracking model grows.
This isn't universal. There are relatively niche sites that people pay to use, or at least have paid tiers. But free is what most people expect. (Look at all the outrage when SmugMug eliminated the 1TB free limit that Yahoo put on Flickr.)
The real question is how you'll get a criticial mass of quality content creators, since while 10/100/1000/whatever could be persuaded to sign up to a new platform pretty easily, YouTube has tens or hundreds of thousands of great content creators on it. Also how to get them to prioritise the new platform over the old one, since many use these new platforma as a secondary one right now, not their first port of call for new content.
It's not an easy problem to solve. Viewers hate ads but also want "free" content. Making it possible for creators to monetize through ads, micropayments, or sponsorship is only part of the solution.
ex: https://f000.backblazeb2.com/file/fred12/anthony/PgIOufN.mp4