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Plex problems with online.net dedicated + Amazon storage Setup
Hey folks,
Learned quite a bit about the dedicated server world in the last month due to this community, thanks to all of you !
I have shifted away form my home server (old notebook + some RAID HDD) to an online.net dedicated server + Amazon Unlimited Storage for my movie files.
Basically the server runs rutorrent + Plex Media Server, which connects to Amazon Cloud to stream the files to my local Raspberry Pi via Direct Play.
While this setup works most of the times great, I have some stutter/ buffering issues during peak times (e.g. 8pm during the week, or on the weekend in general) - testing was done with the same files. The issue is not connected to rutorrent, as I already paused it to see if the problems persist. Further, I have increased the Plex buffer manually to around ~512MB of the RAM and it does not make a difference.
I am not quite sure if this problem is connected to the online.net dedicated server or the Amazon Storage, however I would think the Amazon Storage should show constant performance ...
The Online.net Server I am currently using is the following:
I am thinking about switching to one of the following offers, https://express.ikoula.com/en/dedicated-server#promo
However not quite sure which one I should choose, or if the performance of ikoula is better compared to online.net
If you would have any other recommendation which fit my budget (~15€/ month)/ enough storage (~500 GB) and location requirement (near Germany but not in Germany), that would be highly appreciated.
Cheers !
Comments
Have you checked
iftop
during playback to see if it is acd_cli that is slow?I tried acd_cli with plex and online.net at the beginning of the year. It was really slow, tried OVH BHS after and got great speeds and much lower reponse time. Was unusable at online.net
ftfy!
Be careful hosting movies on amazon unlimited storage.. they're known to browse your content and terminate it at anytime.
Thanks for the heads up ! Files are encrypted, if they are not investing too much time they should not be able to figure them out.
Highly appreciated
Interesting, currently using acd_cli as well ... Could you guide me to the offer you decided for ?
I just used the smallest instance, the $3 per month one and it ran fine, the storage is very limited ofcourse. I had to automatically sync everything to acd. Used it for a few weeks but went back to using a server at home.
Hi, @Roemus did you considered (checked) your ISP as cause of slowness during the peaks?
Also, you can switch to storage VPS, we offer 1 TB for only 2.99 € per month! Our datacenter are located in Lithuania (near German) so speeds should be quite good. Our storage servers are perfect for downloading Linux ISO files, on our community forum you are even able to find Plex tutorial
Well, @time4vps, to be true, your storage VPS are seems to be not suitable for media server purposes. I, pesonnaly, tried to install emby server on a 512 Gb one, and it hangs (probably not enough RAM). Will have to try use as a media storage (anyway, that what it is intended for )
Our storage servers perfectly suits Plex Media Center needs. It's tested and it works just fine As we offer 30-day money back guarantee, your are able to test it without worrying to loose money.
@Roemus do not hesitate in questioning me about our servers or send me a pm if you need any information.
I tried to run a Plex server from online.net to North America, however, it was so slow it kept buffering. Personally, and it might just be me, but I can't get the speeds over FUSE (which is what I assume you have mounted the directory with) to get over 1.5/2.0MBps using a standard cp command. I assumed it's just not enough to stream anything.
I also tried a location in the USA as the ACD mount/Plex server and still got shitty throughput, so if anyone has suggestions I'd love to hear them as well (I would love to get this running).
Thanks for mentioning this. I might pickup an OVH VPS and see how it goes. The ping from my location there is great.
With the exception of "Reddit" do you have any examples / concrete evidence of this happening? I seriously doubt cloud providers have nothing better to do then "browse your content" at will. Unless of course, you are abusing the service.
You are right, I am mounting through FUSE. Will check if this is a problem speedwise.
I am currently validating my OVH VPS and will check how it performs, will let you know.>
@Ikoula said:
Ikoula, will get in touch with you. Definitely will move away form online.net
Sorry, I don't believe that's strictly true.
For a server with zero transcoding needs, I'm sure it's fine. For anything more than that, I don't believe your storage plans have adequate CPU allocation.
If you've tested with 1080p transcodes and can share results and also confirm that it won't be considered abuse I'd be very interested for an upcoming project.
Your issue is almost certainly Online.net <==> AmazonCloud. I have the exact same issue when mounting AmazonCloud via Windows with my Personal Range servers with them.
I even tried the Amazon upload/download app, it wouldn't even stay connected long enough to complete a transfer.
I had nothing but connection issues.
That said, I am using oDrive right now and it syncs between the two without an issue. All the other sync and mount tools I tried failed miserably..timeouts,slow, etc.
Odd. When I use acd_cli to upload/download it works absolutely no problem. Pretty much maxes out at around 25Mbps. It bounces back errors often, but when I've integrity checked the files by re-downloading them they are OK.
It may have something to do with the tools I used.
I had good results with rclone as well, but everything else I've tried have been a complete cluster**** even from my servers at OVH.
Maybe it has something to do with the cluster my account is on with Amazon?
The latest reading I've done says rclone now works amazing with ACD. Apparently the new verion can also mount directories.
I've wondered this as well. Specifically, I'm pretty sure ACD is running off AWS S3, however, when uploading it will sometimes bounce an error with this being the location "content-na.drive.amazonaws.com", so I would assume it's uploading directly to the N.A. servers, not the closest one... but I don't know for sure.
If that is the case, the slow performance on weekends and during the evenings OP experienced isn't shocking.
It happened to me personally, my files weren't encrypted. Believe it or not, they actually do keep track if you have infringing content that shouldn't be on their storage servers. Reddit has a whole bunch of concrete evidence on this, read the thread in /r/plex
That is absolutely shocking that they are trolling our content for that sort of thing. That is a huge deal!
I am not sure I understand why they would be closing an account for having copyrighted content...isn't the point of the service to have a place to backup your data?
Right? Unless they are finding some sort of "Torrent" release on your account ... but technically how do they know you don't own the Bluray and just downloaded that as your "backup".
Are they making huge assumptions? Don't care?
@Foul can you tell us a bit more about the experience?
The only threads I have found on Reddit so far are accounts where the "share" feature has been removed by Amazon which honestly doesn't surprise me at all.
Beyond that, I haven't found anything yet about an entire account being closed.
Even without reports of accounts being shut down or internet police raiding people, I'm genuinely shocked at how brazen people are about hosting multi-TB Plex servers full of pirated content on Amazon's servers.
Call me paranoid maybe, but I'm even surprised that people put their 100% trust into insecure (Encfs) encryption or non-audited hipster startups like Cryfs.
But YOLO, right?
+1!!
Also seeing as your a daredevil, have you tried applying for Plex Cloud? If you have Plex pass of course...
They actively scan for known torrent titles that they get DMCA claims on.
So if it's the same title/MD5 hash you're pretty much screwed if they ever find out while scanning your account.
Never stated an entire account was being closed, but the sharing feature is what allows remote connections to your storage and etc.
I have now tested this setup intensively over the last ~2 weeks.
Performance is much much better compared to online.net, interruptions happen very infrequently (just for a couple of seconds at the beginning of a file).
However, especially during evenings I experience some more trouble with larger files. I finally figured this is due to the connection to the amazon cloud servers and not OVH <-> home.
Final conclusion for this:
Cloud is just not ready yet for this, offers focus on document storage and certainly not high performance streaming. Further, the concerns about data integrity/ transparency are valid and should not be neglected.
I will hence move back to a local dedicated plex server RAID setup, probably with some encrypted Crashplan Backup.
Have figured out my setup I think, but would appreciate any feedback
I own most of the HDDs already, so additional cost will be around ~500€
Setup should be able to stream ~2-3 1080p files at the same time.
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant
Sharing being disabled, to my knowledge, has no effect on your ability to use the API, web browser, etc. to manage your files. It simply disables the option in the web browser for you to create a link for public users to download x file.
Thanks for the update.
I want to buy this IKX-G620 server, but has been out of stock, I am your loyal customers, have purchased your server, and pay semiannually, very stable, I would like to again have one!
They disable sharing when they catch you generating "hotlinks" to media. It was very popular in South America to abuse Amazon as a video streaming host.
But it seems like they start cracking down on the heavy users. First person on Reddit already reports that Amazon completely disabled his drive account after he stored 12 TB of encrypted files on Amazon Cloud Drive.