Using a CDN for a video on a popular Reddit post

I put together some code to get r/NBA submitted Streamables, Streamables are videos with focus on them being used for highlights and short clips. With these clips I would then go on to make an all of r/NBA week 5 streamables in one video.

This was posted at a low traffic time for the sub, basically it was past midnight on a Sunday for the east coast of the USA. The videos file size was 1.47 GB and I decided to use BunnyCDNs storage to host and deliver this content.

I wanted to have full control over the video (No YouTube or Streamable), to avoid buffering, false DMCA claims, scrapers and the tracking they do.

I thought users would like the idea in combining clips but did not think it would be popular and even make it to the front page from being posted at a slow time.

The video went on to have strong viewing for 24 hours and at the time of this post it’s still being viewed. After 24 hours 1,003 points 97% upvote rate and 43 comments.

The BunnyCDN stats:

Almost 10 TB of data with 155,817 requests!

EDIT – 24 hours on and currently at 13.88 TB and 159,680 requests!

North America had vast majority of the traffic, keep in mind the locations listed are the only locations for storage zones. It is simply the closest location to the user fetching the data, Therefor Australia and Asia would have been using Los Angeles, South America -> Miami.

I can learn a lot from this, whilst r/NBA would have a decent following from Europe the traffic was small. If i wanted to run an even cheaper CDN I could use some small VPS’s in North America and have close to the same results as using BunnyCDN.

The 24 hours of heavy usage cost over $45 in BunnyCDN credits interestingly i would be able to beat this price using a few VPS’s during a 48 hour period of posting and then resorting back to central location for the video to age.

Knowing that future videos will be smaller in size, as i will be resorting to votes and comments to determine what gets used using a CDN without revenue generation isn’t the smartest idea. Alternatives will sit at Google Drive, VPS style CDN’s or maybe even just one centrally located VPS on a fast network.

This was also a good indication of why YouTube wont be toppled for some time, you simply need a LOT of money to serve video content quickly.