Thanks, Matt.
I’m now understanding more - but not sure this is getting easier. 
Clearly, I have more to consider - ahead of which, is it right for me to assume that ‘guaranteed connectivity’ (that’s probably not the right term) is unlikley, and that finding a provider who’ll guarantee ‘yes, we can get all of that 320-odd gb out into the world in timely fashion’ is impractical/impossible and expensive?
I’d honestly look for a specialist streaming host, or a CDN that specializes in streaming radio so you know listeners don’t get cut off.
I think it will end up being more expensive than 100TB. But why not offset the costs with some advertising? Doesn’t have to be too intrusive but may justify the higher expenses. If you find a good CDN that can support all those listeners, you will only need 1 or 2 servers.
Matt
Thanks. Good points. Appreciated.
“For a download or a streaming site, you probably want to look at a CDN solution anyway. There’s options like CloudFlare, NetDNA and others that let you pay per GB or buy bandwidth in bulk that may reduce your costs and will definitely increase customer performance and server capacity.”
We really won’t help with downloads or streaming per se (recommend moving large downloads or streaming to subdomains that we don’t touch in your CloudFlare DNS settings) because we only cache static content files by default.
Note:You can set more advanced caching rules with PageRules. But I would still recommend keeping streaming content running through a subdomain we don’t proxy or cache…
Akamai? CDN used by a lot of major companies, I know Microsoft used them to stream their tech shows live, like TechEd and Build.
> For a download or a streaming site, you probably want to look at a CDN solution anyway. There’s options like CloudFlare, NetDNA and others that let you pay per GB or buy bandwidth in bulk that may reduce your costs and will definitely increase customer performance and server capacity.
Thanks. If I have a group of machines hooked-up to a sufficiently fat pipe calculalated on a genuine need-this-much basis rather than oversold, why do I need cdn? At rates I’ve seen, cdn is still considerably more expensive than the 10-12 servers this should eventually need.
it’s not an argumentative question, simply that on what I know (not very much) I don’t rate the cdn advantage of being either necessary or appropriately beneficial relative to price.
>Akamai? CDN used by a lot of major companies.
Thanks. I’m aware of them/that, and as explained above aren’t convinced of cdn.
I believe that in many cases, corporate/enterprise-level hostin is over-specified, driven by the usual high-budget availability/wastage and ‘well,that’s what everybody else does and so it’s clearly the safe choice and thus I’ll be less likely to get fired through choosing that’.
As an example, I’m just not interested in paying Amazon S3-type pricing.
CDNs typically have the advantage of dynamically serving the file from the geographically nearest server to provide optimum speed and latency. They’ll typically hold the file on multiple points of presence around the globe. They’ll never be cheaper than bandwidth you’ll get from a dedicated server.
Thanks. It’s that significant price differential that’s the problem.