Hosting required for site similar to chatroulette.com

Cianos

Hi,
I have an idea for a site that is somewhat comparable to the video chat site chatroulette.com. I want to find out what kind of undertaking it'd be to run a site like that? I presume there would be a lot of bandwidth usage if users are sending and receiving video/audio?

Thanks for any advice.

mneylon

hi

It depends on how you handle it ie. if the data is going peer to peer or via a central hub of some kind

Anything involving video = lots of bandwidth (generally) and lots of diskspace (though you might avoid that if you're only doing streams and not actually holding anything)

Cianos

Blacknight wrote: »

hi

It depends on how you handle it ie. if the data is going peer to peer or via a central hub of some kind

Anything involving video = lots of bandwidth (generally) and lots of diskspace (though you might avoid that if you're only doing streams and not actually holding anything)

Would there be an economical way to scale it up according to usage? For example if I want to cater for about 50 users in the beginning and if there is a bigger demand increase the hosting capabilities?

And there'd be no need for storing video and audio, just streaming.

mneylon

A lot would depend on how you're planning on running the site.. ie. how it's coded etc.,

Hosting it once you have an idea of how it's going to work is feasible, but which kind of solution you'll need will vary

Cianos

Blacknight wrote: »

A lot would depend on how you're planning on running the site.. ie. how it's coded etc.,

Hosting it once you have an idea of how it's going to work is feasible, but which kind of solution you'll need will vary

My problem right now is that I don't know the best way to do it. I don't have a background in development so I don't know the technical aspects of it. I'm basically looking for the most cost effective way to deliver a good quality platform. The site will be fairly low in terms of features. It'll essentially be like chatroulette except there'll be a limited selection process to filter who you are connected with.

Any suggestions welcome

Cianos

Hi again,
I came across a crowd that sell an "out of the box" chatroulette clone. This may be my best option so long as it works well. Their site includes this in the FAQ about the bandwidth;

How about the bandwidth?

Chatroulette Clone leverages the latest Flash peer-to-peer technology.

The audio and video data, which makes for the major part of the data exchanged, is transmitted directly between the two Flash Player instances involved in a chat session.

The data is not routed through either your servers, nor through Adobe’s servers. It is a straight, direct connection between the two chat partners. Consequently, it does not consume any of your servers uplink/downlink bandwidth.

Only the Flash application itself and the lightweight PHP scripts are served from your own web server. As the Flash application is a one-time download that gets cached by your users’ browsers, it does not consume any of your bandwidth while it is running and on subsequent loads.

mneylon

If that works they way they're describing it then a normal shared hosting account would be able to handle it

Cianos

I came across another site that also offer a clone of the platform. However they don't seem to operate in the same way as the one I mentioned above. Their Server requirements describe the following;

HTTP Web Hosting
PHP (The PHP implementation is simple so it can be migrated to other scripting languages like ASP or JSP).
Provided php sample scripts require these default php settings:
error_reporting E_ALL ^ E_NOTICE
short_open_tag On
MySQL (not required for the php only stand alone simple integration)
RTMP Flash Media Server Hosting
VideoWhisper rtmp application is developed and supported for these types servers:
Flash Media Interactive Server (FCS1.5 -FMIS3.5)
or
Red5 - Open Source Server (v0.7-0.9+ with JDK6)
or
Wowza Media Server (v2 with JDK6)

Server Power
The hardware configuration depends very much on the number of website members and visitors and also on website settings and target, so we cannot give you exact requirements. The most important thing is rtmp server connectivity.
We recommend servers with 100Mbps or 1000Mbps ports in well connected data centers (that have gigabyte connections with several providers).

mneylon

The peer to peer style solution would make a lot more sense, though I've no idea how good (or bad) either script is

Cianos

Blacknight wrote: »

The peer to peer style solution would make a lot more sense, though I've no idea how good (or bad) either script is

Yes that's my worry, they could turn out to be tosh and I'm not sure how to determine their quality without taking the plunge.

mneylon

Cianos wrote: »

Yes that's my worry, they could turn out to be tosh and I'm not sure how to determine their quality without taking the plunge.

That's always going to be a problem with any kind of software system.

The only thing you can really do is to see if other people have posted reviews about ti covering their experiences ..