Say I had a cloud server such as Azure or AWS. And I had some sort of simulation running (maybe a simple Unity game or just an animation). Then I wanted to stream this to YouTube. (e.g. using OBS on the server to stream this to YouTube).
Therefor taking the strain off the cloud server and dumping it into the YouTube servers. So even if a million people watched the stream my server is only sending it once.
So people could watch this live stream through YouTube.
Say this stream was 24 hours. How much do you think this would cost per month?
Stream from your desktop for a minute using the quality level you would use on your cloud server (quality of the stream will likely greatly affect the bandwidth and cost), while monitoring the amount of outbound traffic used. Multiply that minute of traffic by 1440 to get an approximate daily usage, and compute the cost for that traffic using whatever metered pricing your server will have.
Let’s call it conservatively 2Mb/s =2 million bits per second or about 250 kilobytes per second or roughly 1GB per hour.
So lets just call it 24GB per day or 720GB per month. I make that about ÂŁ50 per month.
Well I guess that’s kind of a similar price to how much someone spends on unlimited broadband a month.
But that doesn’t account for the compute time of running the simulation. Which I’m guessing will add lot more!
I always seem to get stung by these cloud services with all their special pricings.
The “simpler” solution, if I needed to do something like this would be to just run it from a spare laptop.
Doing the math, if my streaming channel got 10,000 views per month for some unknown reason it could pay for itself.
Yeah the cloud services are priced extremely high for what you get if you will be using them anymore than intermittently. Renting a slightly out of date dedicated server from a smaller provider will get you more resources for the money.