Is it worth buying a server?

Question

Server equipment

In general, such a situation, there is a budget of 400,000 rubles.
The challenge is to create a website. The site is normal, but video materials will be stored there. Users will log in and watch the video. According to the plan, about 20,000 users per month will visit the site. Approximate memory occupied by videos 20 TB.
The customer wants to buy a server, his personal one. Not hosting, not GVA, etc. I searched the Internet for servers, and a 20+TB hard drive comes out at exorbitant prices than our budget. Either stupidly 1U height is not enough to stick a sufficient number of hard drives on the server.
Basically, how can I solve this problem? Who faced? How expedient is it to buy a powerful server for a higher load? Is it possible to use a PC for the above described loads? My head is spinning, I need help. Help

Answer 1

Users will log in and watch the video.

First, think about buying a CDN service to deliver traffic without overloading the communication channel to the end consumer of the content.
And only then (after all the calculations of the load on the channel, for transcoding the video, etc.) - you will select the config for the video server to clamp / return these videos for viewing.

Answer 2

Let's leave the issues of piracy and content licensing - maybe there is an online broadcast of some kind of production: D
First, let's calculate that:
20,000 people per month - this is 666 people per day (with 30 days) - this is 27 people per hour (with 24 x 7 uniform load , which is, of course, impossible). That is, you have 27 people constantly sitting on the server and watching. What kind of channel do you plan so that it does not slow down hell ?
You first need to design a system that would distribute content to all these 27 users, and only then select a server.

Answer 3

20TB in hard drives costs around ~ 40-50 thousand rubles, with mirroring, respectively, 80-100. 4 disks fit perfectly into a single unit server. the server itself can be taken second-hand

Answer 4

There is a budget of 400,000 rubles.

Is that $5,000 in "normal" money?
Do not buy into them "real" server.

Answer 5

It is advisable to start with the preparation of terms of reference, which will include a preliminary analysis of the attendance of the resource. From here you will get the required minimum data channel bandwidth to meet the needs of the audience for content. Also, you need to determine the minimum and maximum content quality threshold, i.e. the resolution of the video and its bitrate, this will directly affect the amount of data storage. It is more logical to build a system on the meringue of 2 “servers” and 2 storage systems, mirroring both computing nodes and storage systems. In other words, start with a data channel, in our reality a good channel, and better 2 will cost very good money. A 400,000 server without a good channel is a waste of money.

Answer 6

It is important to understand where the bulk of site visitors are located. This is Russia? Maybe it's a specific region? Perhaps it is predominantly from some continent?
He himself has a server for distributing videos. True, there are 2.5 TB of data now, and traffic is 800-1000 GB / day. This is with 3000-3500 uniques per day. You will most likely have less traffic, judging by the attendance.
The parameters of my server are inexpensive xenon, 16gb ram, 3×2tb in RAID0 (I know, it's unreliable, but home Internet at 500bbit/s will allow you to quickly recover data from your computer if something happens). Channel 1gb / s (more often loaded within 150-300Mbps). Content distributes elegantly and without drawdowns at the peaks (50 users at the same time). It costs me $50 a month. This is USA. There are also interesting solutions in Europe.
At the expense of your server - the bottleneck will be the communication channel, as mentioned above. Or it will be expensive (if you rent 1+Gb/s). CDN is also not an option, as it will end up being very expensive for traffic.
In general, it is better to rent a server (with a good communication channel to boot) than to buy your own. The question is only parameters - and it depends on the specifics. To distribute statics with nginx (mp4), it is important to look at the communication channel and HDD - this can become a bottleneck.