My recent Quick Look videos were inspired in large part by the highly hilarious “You Suck At Photoshop” series, which features 10 tutorials by the long-suffering Donnie Hoyle, Photoshop extrodinarre. But as I set about figuring out the logistics, one of the issues I had to consider was the bandwidth that would be used. Videos are pretty bandwidth-intensive, and even the 10 MByte videos I had posted would take their toll on my monthly bandwidth allocation if I wasn’t careful. Like any SMB, the last thing I wanted was a huge surprise bill at the end of the month for bandwidth overages. (Whether or not I’m wildly over-estimating my popularity is another issue.)
I’ve talked before about 100 Megabit limits on value-market load balancers and how the limit is more ISP-bandwidth related than it is traffic related. For any site, bandwidth is a concern, but for the SMB market, budgets are much more constrained and so is the amount of bandwidth they can afford.
So I made the decision to host it on youtube instead. This is a pretty popular route for SMBs to get videos on the Internet, as they provide the free bandwidth as well as a lot of very handy, simple tools for integrating videos into pages, etc., that would be much more time consuming done in a “roll-your-own” way.
This is one of the options available to the SMB market to “keep it off the load balancer”. By shifting high-bandwidth objects to externally hosted sources, this keeps traffic off the load balancer (and off your web infrastructure), and ensures that bandwidth utilization is much more predictable while still getting all sorts of fancy.
