Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!


VPS for Plex
New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.

All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.

VPS for Plex

azrael0528azrael0528 Member
edited January 2021 in Help

Hello,

Am looking for a VPS/ Dedicated Server which I would be using for Plex since am migrating from GDrive.

Would be great if it could handle 4K streams as well as multiple concurrent streams.

Expected storage would be 5x10tb and should be able to add few more disks later in life.

Location preferably in EU.

Traffic should be 20TB+.

Current budget is around 100$ (Flexible).

Do let me know if you require further details.

«1

Comments

  • stefemanstefeman Member
    edited January 2021

    50TB of storage for 70 USD counting in the VPS specs and bandwidth too?

    Only BuyVM or Novos offer block storage for around 5-6 USD/TB that I know of. Consider a dedicated server instead.

    https://my.frantech.ca/cart.php?gid=46

    or

    https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/3187313/#Comment_3187313

    This is closest you can get

    https://www.euserv.com/en/dedicated-server/filer-rootserver/v5/filer-v5-40t.php
    or
    https://www.euserv.com/en/dedicated-server/filer-rootserver/v5/filer-v5-80t.php

  • edited January 2021

    Hetzner & OVH dedicated servers.

  • @stefeman said:
    50TB of storage for 70 USD counting in the VPS specs and bandwidth too?

    Done. Ive updated the budget :smile:

  • @chocolateshirt said:
    Hetzner & OVH dedicated servers.

    Hetzner has drive limitations on the AX series. Am not able to add 5 10TB drives.

  • stefemanstefeman Member
    edited January 2021

    50 TB is a lot. and falls between the usual 20TB or 100TB ranges. Try a custom solution.

    @Clouvider
    @Francisco
    @marvel
    @seriesn
    @cociu
    @MrRadic

    Thanked by 1seriesn
  • @azrael0528 said:

    @chocolateshirt said:
    Hetzner & OVH dedicated servers.

    Hetzner has drive limitations on the AX series. Am not able to add 5 10TB drives.

    Look into the PX series.

  • Hetzner SX62 4 x 10TB for just 64 euros, 10 x 10TB tho is a big jump.

  • Yeah i’d also go with a dedi rather than a VPS, although budgets still tight even for the likes of Hetzner.

  • @WSCallum said:
    Yeah i’d also go with a dedi rather than a VPS, although budgets still tight even for the likes of Hetzner.

    yeah am thinking the same but dedi again is a bit on the expensive side.

  • @kennsann said:
    Hetzner SX62 4 x 10TB for just 64 euros, 10 x 10TB tho is a big jump.

    More than SX62, SX132 is peaking my interest since it has 10x10TB drives. The proc is an E5 though.

  • edited January 2021

    @azrael0528 said:
    The proc is an E5 though.

    E5 1650v3 still below Ryzen 5 3600 a little, but still powerfull CPU.

  • Daniel15Daniel15 Veteran
    edited January 2021

    @azrael0528 said: Would be great if it could handle 4K streams as well as multiple concurrent streams.

    Do you need to transcode, or do all your devices support direct play or direct stream of all your content? If you don't need to do any transcoding, your CPU requirements will be far lower as it can just stream the content as-is.

    I'd go with a dedicated server as others have mentioned. Having said that, BuyVM offer storage at $5/TB and you can attach a decent amount to a VPS (up to 10 TB per slab, and up to 8 slabs per VPS).

    Too bad you missed HostHatch's black friday flash sales... They had a VPS in Los Angeles with 10 TB space for $110/year. Very limited stock though, and they don't have dedicated CPU on storage boxes (you'd also have to get one of their NVMe VPSes and mount the storage over the network, for example by using NFS)

  • @Daniel15 said:

    @azrael0528 said: Would be great if it could handle 4K streams as well as multiple concurrent streams.

    Do you need to transcode, or do all your devices support direct play or direct stream of all your content? If you don't need to do any transcoding, your CPU requirements will be far lower as it can just stream the content as-is.

    I'd go with a dedicated server as others have mentioned. Having said that, BuyVM offer storage at $5/TB and you can attach a decent amount to a VPS (up to 10 TB per slab, and up to 8 slabs per VPS).

    Too bad you missed HostHatch's black friday flash sales... They had a VPS in Los Angeles with 10 TB space for $110/year. Very limited stock though, and they don't have dedicated CPU on storage boxes (you'd also have to get one of their NVMe VPSes and mount the storage over the network, for example by using NFS)

    Its direct play or direct stream mostly, I would prefer benchmark score of 10-15k since I have simultaneous streams happening on Plex.

  • Daniel15Daniel15 Veteran
    edited January 2021

    If it's mostly direct stream then CPU requirements aren't very high, as the CPU isn't really doing much. An older E3 or E5 would be fine and you should be able to get one pretty cheaply given how old they are now. Even NAS systems with low-end CPUs handle it fine. It's just transcoding that uses a lot of CPU power.

  • marvelmarvel Member
    edited January 2021

    Try our media server plan: https://billing.novos.be/cart.php?a=add&pid=42

    € 6 for each additional TB and you can grow as much as you want since it's networked storage.

    Btw. forget about 4K/HVEC. You would need a GPU. This would be killing for your CPU unless you direct stream in which case you would need a lot of bandwidth.

    I'm running a Plex server myself, with a Quadro P2000 to handle the 4K/HVEC streams and offload the CPU. I bought a refurb server for that at https://www.serverschmiede.com/ For your config that would be around €2500-3000 with 5 x 10 TB including the GPU.

    Btw for that budget you might be better of with a dedi, although it limits you in available disk space since you need some redundancy as well so that's why I would colocate. If you're interested in colocation sent me a pm.

  • edited January 2021

    @marvel said:
    I'm running a Plex server myself, with a Quadro P2000 to handle the 4K/HVEC streams and offload the CPU. I bought a refurb server for that at https://www.serverschmiede.com/

    Did you transcode the 4k movie? I believe direct play/stream will not burden any CPU.

  • @Daniel15 said:
    If it's mostly direct stream then CPU requirements aren't very high, as the CPU isn't really doing much. An older E3 or E5 would be fine and you should be able to get one pretty cheaply given how old they are now. Even NAS systems with low-end CPUs handle it fine. It's just transcoding that uses a lot of CPU power.

    Yes but sometimes you would need to transcode. If you're in a hotel room with limited bandwidth, or on your cell phone. If you are always depending on direct stream it really limits you so it doesn't make sense to buy a cheap E3 and then couple months later you have to upgrade again.

  • @marvel said:

    @Daniel15 said:
    If it's mostly direct stream then CPU requirements aren't very high, as the CPU isn't really doing much. An older E3 or E5 would be fine and you should be able to get one pretty cheaply given how old they are now. Even NAS systems with low-end CPUs handle it fine. It's just transcoding that uses a lot of CPU power.

    Yes but sometimes you would need to transcode. If you're in a hotel room with limited bandwidth, or on your cell phone. If you are always depending on direct stream it really limits you so it doesn't make sense to buy a cheap E3 and then couple months later you have to upgrade again.

    That's true. Good point.

    I wonder if colo would make the most sense in the long run, since you can just buy a powerful CPU and own it for a long time rather than renting every month?

  • marvelmarvel Member
    edited January 2021

    @Daniel15 said:

    @marvel said:

    @Daniel15 said:
    If it's mostly direct stream then CPU requirements aren't very high, as the CPU isn't really doing much. An older E3 or E5 would be fine and you should be able to get one pretty cheaply given how old they are now. Even NAS systems with low-end CPUs handle it fine. It's just transcoding that uses a lot of CPU power.

    Yes but sometimes you would need to transcode. If you're in a hotel room with limited bandwidth, or on your cell phone. If you are always depending on direct stream it really limits you so it doesn't make sense to buy a cheap E3 and then couple months later you have to upgrade again.

    That's true. Good point.

    I wonder if colo would make the most sense in the long run, since you can just buy a powerful CPU and own it for a long time rather than renting every month?

    For his use case and his requirements in terms of space yeah I would say so since you can always upgrade and replace drives, or add a GPU. You can do anything you want. Dedis with lots of storage and big CPUs are very rare, and if you find one you pay big for it. If you colo you can earn that back in maybe 1-2 years.

    It does require some effort though and an initial investment. Plus you need to worry about redundancy and hardware failures.

    I'm running a Plex box myself and I refuse to delete anything, so I just keep adding disk space. I'm at around 45 TB now since the last 2-3 years :wink: And that's with redundancy in mind so I need 90-100 TB effective. Running your own Plex server is something that can get out of control pretty fast, you start to add friends, family etc. ;)

  • ClouviderClouvider Member, Patron Provider

    Have a look at our sales servers here, https://www.clouvider.co.uk/dedicated-servers-sale/ :-)

    Thanks @stefeman

  • yoursunnyyoursunny Member, IPv6 Advocate

    @marvel said:

    @Daniel15 said:
    If it's mostly direct stream then CPU requirements aren't very high, as the CPU isn't really doing much. An older E3 or E5 would be fine and you should be able to get one pretty cheaply given how old they are now. Even NAS systems with low-end CPUs handle it fine. It's just transcoding that uses a lot of CPU power.

    Yes but sometimes you would need to transcode. If you're in a hotel room with limited bandwidth, or on your cell phone. If you are always depending on direct stream it really limits you so it doesn't make sense to buy a cheap E3 and then couple months later you have to upgrade again.

    If user is occasionally in a hotel room and occasionally needs more CPU power for encoding, they can still use a cheap storage box and spin up an hourly compute instance when those occasion occurs.

    My push-ups are pre-encoded to five resolutions with Shaka Packager during upload. This allows me to use the cheapest available compute power, without much requirements on network speed and latency.

    If real-time encoding is needed, the hourly compute instance would have to have good network connection to the storage.

  • @yoursunny said:

    @marvel said:

    @Daniel15 said:
    If it's mostly direct stream then CPU requirements aren't very high, as the CPU isn't really doing much. An older E3 or E5 would be fine and you should be able to get one pretty cheaply given how old they are now. Even NAS systems with low-end CPUs handle it fine. It's just transcoding that uses a lot of CPU power.

    Yes but sometimes you would need to transcode. If you're in a hotel room with limited bandwidth, or on your cell phone. If you are always depending on direct stream it really limits you so it doesn't make sense to buy a cheap E3 and then couple months later you have to upgrade again.

    If user is occasionally in a hotel room and occasionally needs more CPU power for encoding, they can still use a cheap storage box and spin up an hourly compute instance when those occasion occurs.

    My push-ups are pre-encoded to five resolutions with Shaka Packager during upload. This allows me to use the cheapest available compute power, without much requirements on network speed and latency.

    If real-time encoding is needed, the hourly compute instance would have to have good network connection to the storage.

    This reply really confused me for the last 15 minutes lol

    There's a big difference between 4 push-up clips and a library with 5000 movies and 15000 episodes encoded to 5 different resolutions.

    I already see myself in a hotel room with a date. Hey let's watch a movie! Ah yes wait I have to fire up my compute node first, connect my storage box. Oh wait the bandwidth is not sufficient, hang on I'll re-encode the movie to a lower resolution, this will only take 4 hours and 25 minutes.

    Thanked by 1kwaralala
  • Doing 10 UHD Streams on a Raspberry Pi is no problem, more will cause problems because you max out the 1 gigabit interface.
    I would never even think about reencoding stuff because the tonemapping done by plex sucks.

  • stefemanstefeman Member
    edited January 2021

    @user54321 said:
    Doing 10 UHD Streams on a Raspberry Pi is no problem, more will cause problems because you max out the 1 gigabit interface.
    I would never even think about reencoding stuff because the tonemapping done by plex sucks.

    I love transcoding myself. It just works. You give CPU resources and you get easiness of use.

  • I dunno why you guys need a quadro, honestly transcoding 4k is really crap. Just get 2 copies of everything, 1080p and 4k if you really need it.

    @OP you can just get an SX server from hetzner and pair it up with an auction E3-1275v6 or an i7-8700 which has igpu then NFS/CIFS the storage to your stream server. Hetzner has free private and public network at 1gbit.

  • Thanks a lot for your comments guys, but ive decided to build a local server at home and run plex off it. This way most of my requirements are sorted out and upgrades can be done easily.

  • good, now only missing 10gbps pipe

  • yoursunnyyoursunny Member, IPv6 Advocate

    @marvel said:
    There's a big difference between 4 push-up clips and a library with 5000 movies and 15000 episodes encoded to 5 different resolutions.

    YouTube has even more content, and all of them have 5 different resolutions.


    @yoursunny said:

    @marvel said:

    @Daniel15 said:
    If it's mostly direct stream then CPU requirements aren't very high, as the CPU isn't really doing much. An older E3 or E5 would be fine and you should be able to get one pretty cheaply given how old they are now. Even NAS systems with low-end CPUs handle it fine. It's just transcoding that uses a lot of CPU power.

    Yes but sometimes you would need to transcode. If you're in a hotel room with limited bandwidth, or on your cell phone. If you are always depending on direct stream it really limits you so it doesn't make sense to buy a cheap E3 and then couple months later you have to upgrade again.

    If user is occasionally in a hotel room and occasionally needs more CPU power for encoding, they can still use a cheap storage box and spin up an hourly compute instance when those occasion occurs.

    If real-time encoding is needed, the hourly compute instance would have to have good network connection to the storage.

    I already see myself in a hotel room with a date. Hey let's watch a movie! Ah yes wait I have to fire up my compute node first, connect my storage box. Oh wait the bandwidth is not sufficient, hang on I'll re-encode the movie to a lower resolution, this will only take 4 hours and 25 minutes.

    You need real time conversion in this case.
    Downscaled content will be streamed from the compute node to the viewer.

    Use automation to create and configure the compute node. If you design it right, it'll be ready in 3 minutes.

    When the viewer is browsing the catalog, you can already detect available bandwidth and decide whether a compute node is required. If so, you can already start to initiate it.
    In case the viewer selects a title before 3 minutes time is up, just play some music or pre-encoded advertisements to mask the delay.

    This approach can also support large number of viewers that require downscaling: you just buy more hourly compute nodes as the demand arises, and destroy them when demand disappears.

  • @yoursunny said: YouTube has even more content, and all of them have 5 different resolutions.

    YouTube also has slightly more compute power than users of LowEndTalk :tongue:

    @marvel said: I already see myself in a hotel room with a date. Hey let's watch a movie! Ah yes wait I have to fire up my compute node first, connect my storage box. Oh wait the bandwidth is not sufficient, hang on I'll re-encode the movie to a lower resolution, this will only take 4 hours and 25 minutes.

    That's why it's "Netflix and chill", not "/r/selfhosted Plex server and chill"

    @azrael0528 said: ive decided to build a local server at home and run plex off it

    You could consider building a rackmount server and colocating it :smile: The issue I'd have with hosting a Plex server at home is that I'm in California where electricity is relatively expensive, and my internet connection doesn't have good upload speeds. I know a few people that colo with Hurricane Electric in Fremont - Not sure how much they charge for a single 1U server, but they have an offer for $400/month for a 42U cabinet, so some people just get a bunch of friends (each with their own servers) and all chip in.

    Thanked by 1bdl
  • @marvel said:
    I already see myself in a hotel room with a date.

    You forgot the quotation marks around "date" :tongue:

Sign In or Register to comment.