Vimeo only gives you 2 TB bandwidth/month without negotiating an Enterprise plan. If your video goes viral, you're going to be out thousands to host it for everyone. How are you going to pay for that? You could put it on credit and then show these numbers when manually negotiating the payout from your next sponsor and pay it back with the proceeds from the next video, but there's no guarantee your next video will be also a hit.
That's what PeerTube is supposed to be for. You can set up a PeerTube host yourself.
Or there are some public PeerTube hosts that accept uploads.
When people are watching your videos, the ones with good bandwidth are also hosting them for other users. The hosting site is just handling the original copy and coordinating the peers. (This isn't like Bittorrent; hosting is centralized but playout is distributed. When no one is watching, the only copy is on the original server.)
PeerTube really should be popular like WordPress, for self-hosted content. But it's not.
Neither Google nor Bing indexes PeerTube sites, so there's no discovery. Few PeerTube videos have more than a handful of viewers. I use PeerTube for technical videos, to keep them ad-free, and it works fine for that low-volume application.
Here's the Blender 4.2 showcase reel on PeerTube.[1] It's a good demo. Will it overload if watched by many HN users? Please try.
PeerTube is just a self-hosted video platform. Video bandwidth is legitimately expensive. You'll still be out a bunch of money if your video goes viral.
No, that's the whole point of PeerTube.
PeerTube scales up by spreading the playout load amongst everyone who is watching at the moment.
If a thousand people are watching your video, most of them are getting the content from the cache of others who are also watching at the moment. Not from the hosting server.
This works well only if many of the watchers have significant upload bandwidth and aren't behind firewalls that prevent them from outputting blocks of video.
This is different from torrent-type systems or Usenet, which distribute persistent copies.
With Peertube, only the original server permanently hosts the video. Everybody else is just caching.
So the disk usage of watchers isn't that big.
Now your castle is in someone else's kingdom. And in Cloudflare's kingdom, always be ready to get an email: "pay us $150,000 in 24 hours or we cancel your service"
Exactly. At the end of the day Google has to pay for that bandwith too, and they manage to do it with only ads. Bandwith is not as expensive as some people think, many hosting companies just like to overcharge.
