Do I need a CDN to deliver video?
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My site is increasingly dependent on video for free and for paid course content. In the last several months I’ve been adding lots of video. For the free content (the publicly-available blog posts), I’ve started posting new videos on YouTube because I’m growing the channel.
For the course content, however, I’ve been continuing to upload videos to Amazon S3, which I started using several years ago. Until my most recent push (1.7GB in the last six months), the cost has been fairly reasonable. In the last several months, however, the cost has nearly quadrupled to over $100/month.
Does anyone have any experience with using a CDN for delivering video content? I’m considering Amazon Cloudfront (since it appears the content can be taken free from the existing S3 bucket), and I do already have a free DNS account with Cloudflare. I’m just beginning to research this, so any experiences or recommendations you can share would be helpful.
Deborah
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Have you looked into Bunny.net?
Not even considering additional CloudFront costs, AWS with a standard S3 bucket charges 2.3 cents per GB/month for storage plus 9 cents per GB for data transfer (after the first GB).
Bunny.net offers a CDN (so video is served up from a server near your visitor) for 1-3 cents per GB/month and then charges 1-6 cents per GB of transfer (Europe and North America is 1 cent per GB, assuming that you have a mostly English-speaking customer base.)
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Another option is Vimeo Pro, which costs $240 per year. You can upload up to 20 GB of video per week, and they don’t charge for bandwidth. You don’t have to use their built in player or embed code; you can use a link to access the video file directly (though you’ll lose out on stats through Vimeo that way.)
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I think Vimeo Pro is perfect for course creators, personally. Just really easy to use.
Bunny.net also an option, although I’ve only used it vis the Presto Player. Which, BTW, might also be a good option for you for your videos. It is new, but developing quickly.
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I have looked at Vimeo Pro. I wasn’t sure if I was reading the terms of service right in terms of how much they charge for bandwidth (as opposed to storage).
I’ve heard of Bunny.net (vaguely) and will have to check that out. It’s a problem I need to solve before Amazon runs me out of money.
Thanks to you both for the knowledgeable replies! I actually had someone somewhere else suggest in all seriousness that I just upload everything to YouTube as a “private” video, claiming that a lot of the “big names” do it. I just can’t see that working long term!
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Nah, I only use Youtube for public stuff. For private stuff, not a great idea to hand that over to Google. Their interest is not your’s.
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I am switching over to Vimeo. I hate all the ads on Facebook so the private content goes to Vimeo. Still figuring the fine points out but it works pretty easily.
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