Americans who host media servers for friends & family and are forced to use a cable-based ISP, what is your upload/download setup? Also, what is your rationale for your speeds?
Xfinity is not cheap, upload speeds are garbage and although I want my users to have a great experience, I don’t want to spend tons of money to host this?
Do you make your users pay for access? That seems pretty shitty imo but I’m hosting encodes (no remuxes) but between my various non-local family members and a couple buddies from college, I’m maxing out my upload speeds and need to figure out what to do.
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Comcast recently upgraded their internet in our area to give us better upload speeds (from 16mbps to 200mbps) but I’d previously been sharing Linux ISOs with friends and family with a bitrate cap on Plex of 3mbps. With this, I was sometimes able to have 5 concurrent remote streams. Quality certainly wasn’t the best but nobody really even seemed to notice when I asked about it and I’d explained to everyone that due to the shitty upload speed I was limited on how many people could watch at the same time.
I don’t charge anyone for anything but several have offered money or bribes of beer or food over the years. As others have mentioned, with payments comes and expectations of priority or uptime and I can’t guarantee that stuff.
In my area Xfinity cable has decent upload now, though it still trails fiber. Doing a speed test just now I get 2 gigabit down and 300 megabit up and I pay $85/month with a five year price lock. This is a relatively recent phenomenon so worth checking out if you can get a similar package. Prior to this I was getting 25-32 megabit.
I’ve never made my friends or family pay, but prior to getting decent upload bandwidth I did cap remote streams / concurrent transcodes and let people duke it out fist come first serve. Mostly it was fine. I’ve given maybe 15 people access, but only a few are regularly active.
I also keep a small offsite server at a family members house that splits some of my user base and serves as an offsite backup.
I started self hosting when I had only 100Mbps down/10Mbps up. For about 5 years years I told my friends and family that I didn’t have fast upload speeds so if several people were streaming at the same time there could be issues. Beggers cant be choosers, so they got what they got. That being said, I always tried to get smaller files so that less bandwidth was needed and that helped a lot
I lived alone so 100Mbps down/10Mbps up was plenty for me and I wasn’t going to upgrade to a faster plan. I also worked from home with those speeds without any issues and I would have continued with that internet plan if I still lived there. My new place includes 1.2Gb down/up so bandwidth isn’t the bottleneck for me any longer.
Set throttling.
Ideally set it at your egress point so that sessions get throttled only when your max upload is reached.