How much bandwidth for a HD paysite?
 

Strange enough, it looks like no one has asked this question before, at least not recently. Next year, probably in summer, I plan to release my first paysite. However, of course I'm already checking available options for billing, CMS and hosting.

What I plan to do is one paysite with exclusive HD content, a few flash trailers on the tour pages, a small CCBill affiliate program with a few hosted picture galleries and some hosted flash galleries.

How much bandwidth would you say should I have included in my hosting deal, at the very least? Of course I'd especially like to hear comments from ppl who launched something similar recently.

I also saw the offer from Elevated X and MojoHost, CMS with dedicated server with 25 Mbps included. Actually I think that is FAR too low for a paysite with big downloadable movie files - not to talk about hosted galleries. I mean the content server for my free tubes where I only host the screenshots and a tiny bit of the tube movies already needs more than 30 Mbps.

So, I'd really like to hear your opinions.

What bitrate are you going to stream in? What formats? How many members do you expect?

Good questions. About how many members... No clue, absolutely. It's gonna be in a niche which is not so big, so I don't think more than 200-300 members at a time is realistic.

I plan to offer

1920x1080 mp4 files, downloadable (about 2GB per file)
640x360 wmv files, downloadable (probably around 300MB)
720x405 flv streaming, bitrate 1500 kb/s

As you are dealing with a lot of unknown variables it is quite hard to give an accurate figure. I can tell you however out of experience that with 300 members 25 Mbps is nowhere near enough.

So the most important thing is to know your overusage rate up front to avoid huge bandwidth bills. Shop around before you pick a hosting provider, every host can deliver elevated x and probably for a lot less.

Well, personally I find $399 for Elevated X and a DELL Quad Core Xeon 2.4GHZ server with 2X1TB SATA RAID Hard Drives not too bad, if you consider that the script itself already costs at least $149/month.

Thanks a lot for your comments, though. I was thinking about something around 100 Mbps for the start. Which seems to be more realistic.

$15 / mbit overusage aint so cheap though.
75 Mbit overusage in this case would mean a bill of $1125

All of our hosted CMS plans can be customized as needed to give you more storage and bandwidth. They start at 25MBPS and you can expand on this as you grow.

Please shoot me an email at [email protected] and I'll reply with the current MojoHost pricing for increasing our plans to 50, 75, 100 and 200 MBPS :thumbsup

AJ

If you've got 200-300 members on your site there wont be more then a couple online at any given time. That 25 mbits will be more then enough.