supporting thousands of viewers and listeners

[subatta]

A radio and tv station which is becoming quite popular wants to move towards internet broadcast.

Ordinarily there are a few hundred audience. With shoutcast, what hardware and bandwidth requirements/strategies should we look at to adopt since redundancy for peak times (thousands of audience) for live media is an absolute must.

I would very much appreciate your unbiased input/suggestions in the matter.

Thanks.

[fc*uk]

http://www.radiotoolbox.com/hosts/

These guys review hosts and give links to the sites. You can look at the sites to get an idea of cost. If you are looking at 100's of listeners (say 200) at 96 kbps I would guess you are going to be around $500 a month.

[subatta]

ok. that was a start. But the radio company wants to invest in their own server hardware and stuff.. what kind of redundancies are they looking at?

[fc*uk]

Well, that really depends upon how many total listeners you are going to have. As I am sure you guessed that one server could not handle thousands of people. I am not too sure about cpu requirements when the numbers get that big, so maybe someone else here can give a shout out about that.

In terms of a line that can provide this for you, you are going to need something massive. A general rule of thumb is bandwidth = 1.1*bitrate*users ... for thousands of people maybe an OCx or DSx line....

[Nick@ss]

you would be better off contacting hosting companies direct as people may specify different setups,

as fc*uk says 1 box will not hold thousands of listeners

there are deciated offerings out there for unmetered bandwidth and transfer bandwidth,

if its only a few hundred listeners / viewers to start then 1 box and 1 spare would be required and you can grow from there,

without exact spcifications then it is hard from anyone to comment.

unless you would like the hosting company to manage everything then a different price creak will occur,,

this is the nest advice you can get,,
http://www.radiotoolbox.com/hosts/

get the specifics from here and you will see a brightr picture,

[DJ AmPs]

One box can handle 1000's of listeners if the pipe and CPU is big enuff.

A dual opteron with 4Gb RAM and a gig-e for example, would easily handle several thousand viewers. Buy a second machine as failover/backup.

However, the primary cost driver will be bandwidth and colocation fees, not the servers themselves. I recommend contacting several colocation outfits if you intend on using your own hardware, unless you have your own in-house gigabit fiber.

[Nick@ss]

also something worth remembering..

having all your listeners on 1 box is putting all your eggs in 1 basket which is never a good idea if you are looking at a deploment of that size,

resilience is the key..

ps ignore the typos above,,, i just re read my post and it seems i was typing too fast lol

[DJ AmPs]

Originally posted by DJ AmPs
Buy a second machine as failover/backup.

[subatta]

DJ Amps,

Thanks for the sight.

When you say bandwidth you mean ISP level internet access like those ocx's fc*uk says?

The company does have a 4mb line now.. would like be sufficient with some tough harware and a backup box?

[subatta]

also, gig-e you mean a gigabit ethernet card?

[Jay]

a 4mb line would hold about 40 listeners at a high bitrate. If you go with the lowest possible bitrate in the shoutcast dsp you could increase your listeners to 120.

A gig drop is essential for handling over a 1000 listeners.

[DJ AmPs]

Yes a gig-e is 1000Mb's. =)

Like KXRM sayes that 4Mb line will crumble fast!

[MegaRock]

The advice I haven't seen posted yet is this - scalability.

Since you are just starting this it's very likely it will take some time for the demand to build up. Start small and add capacity as you need. To reduce the work you need to do start with a hosting company and as the demand grows you can add capacity onto that server or start heading into a colocated/dedicated server system. Right now in an audio only role I handle just shy of 1,000 concurrent listeners and spend out around 600.00 for that bandwidth and the leased servers. Most of those listeners are at 192k or 128k and a small portion (100 or so) that are 32k AAC+.

I do concur that you want more than one server and if possible more than one provider and geographic location. I have servers in LA, Dallas and Orlando so I'm covered against ISP problems as well as disasters that hit a geographic area like last years hurricanes.