Disadvantages of hosted streams?

Talk about Audio On Demand or Streaming
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Jay Levitt
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Disadvantages of hosted streams?

Post by Jay Levitt »

We\'re setting up a colo for our radio web site, which is going to run a lot of custom software. Bandwidth at colos gets very expensive (on the order of $8-$15 per megabit), so I\'m checking out streaming hosts like egihosting and fastserv to relay our streams; they\'re much more affordable, of course.

The only downsides I can see of using a streaming host are:
  • The IP address is owned by that host, not us. If a streaming client caches or bookmarks the IP address, and we switch providers, the bookmark will break. Do any clients cache the IP address?
  • We can set a CNAME for that IP address, so that the bookmark appears to be http://stream.mystation.com, but if a client does a reverse lookup, it\'ll show server10.egihosting.com. No technical problem, of course, but it\'s not great from a site-branding perspective. Do any clients display reverse-lookup names?
  • Each stream host provides their own custom port number, which of course becomes a permanent part of the bookmark. If I use egihosting, and get port #5778, then later, if I switch to fastserv, I\'d have to make sure that I\'m on port #5778 of some server. That seems pretty unlikely. Has anyone had to deal with this issue?
Any thoughts from people who\'ve switched providers would be useful.
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Jay
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Post by Jay »

All this may be a problem if you do not heavily emphasize your website. If listeners know your brand and can find your website easily then it really is a non-issue.

Typically the client gets the IP if they tune in from a yp. As far as I know most listeners do not care to do a rDNS lookup on different relays. Even if they did it wouldn't really matter much to them, nor would it be confusing to them. Many are used to the fact of multiple relays and server switching, it is just a fact of life.

The only time I have seen it really become an issue is when you have hard links from places like iTunes, these people make it difficult to update your entries into their directory.
- Jay
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