Why Dedicated Server Hosting Is Perfect for Streaming Content
Perhaps you’re a beauty influencer, who wants to share all your step-by-step video tutorials with your online audience.
Perhaps you’re a business owner, specializing in webinars that attract hundreds of thousands of users from around the world.
Perhaps you’re an established musician and want to live stream new tunes for your subscribers on your website.
These three hypothetical examples have two very important things in common:
- They each pertain to a category called content sharing/streaming.
- They each require a certain type of website hosting.
Meet Dedicated Server Hosting, the most powerful type of website hosting that’s designed to handle all your content hosting and streaming needs. With a Dedicated Server, you have the unique opportunity to control the content you create and how that’s shared with your audience and/or subscribers. Unlike sharing on external platforms (e.g. YouTube), a Dedicated Server gives you full freedom over how your content gets shared and distributed.
Streaming Content vs Downloading Content
From a technical POV, streaming is technology that allows for the continuous transmission of audio or video files from a server to an end-user. To put it plainly, streaming is what you do when you watch Netflix or listen to that favorite podcast of yours on your iPhone.
Your next question may very well be, what’s the difference between streaming and downloading, then?
Good question. In streaming, you don’t actually download any files. It’s simply a method of viewing video or listening to audio content, no downloading required. Before either one can be streamed, however, it must be read from a file on disk. Then that respective video or audio file is stored remotely and subsequently transmitted over the Internet within a few seconds.
Downloading is a bit more old school. If you download a video, the copy of that entire file is saved onto your PC or laptop’s hard drive, and you’re not able to play the video until it finishes downloading.
However, there’s a catch. In a perfect world, streaming content is synonymous with a fast server. Meaning, you don’t experience any lag (latency) or poor video/audio quality. That’s why reliable and powerful web hosting is so crucial to streaming success.
Here, you need web hosting that can handle the high bandwidth (aka visitor traffic) and the processing needs that inevitably come from streaming heavier amounts of content. Although Shared Hosting is fantastic for a variety of reasons, it doesn’t let its users stream.
The solution? A Dedicated Server, which provides you with these aforementioned resources and other useful features to help you get the most out of your audio or video streaming experience.
What’s a Dedicated Server, Anyway?
A Dedicated Server refers to a physical machine with all the resources (bandwidth, RAM, CPU, etc.) reserved for your usage. With airtight security and customized control, Dedicated Server Hosting is ideal for tech-savvy folks and for online businesses that are resource-intensive and handle a considerable amount of daily traffic.
Compared to entry-level Shared Hosting, where you share a slice of the designated resources with potentially hundreds of other users, a Dedicated Server means you get the entire “resource” pie to yourself. This means zero interruptions from noisy neighbors.
VPS Hosting does give your website its own private “virtual” space but technically you’re still sharing a server, even though its overall performance is more consistent than Shared Hosting. While VPS Hosting and Dedicated Servers do share similar qualities, a Dedicated Server provides you with far greater customization options, faster page-loading times, and uptime. Although the cost can be steep, a Dedicated Server is unrivaled in terms of its performance.
What Features Are Essential for Content Hosting and Streaming?
Here are just a few of the features that a Dedicated Server offers you, meeting your demand for content hosting and streaming.
Bandwidth
Since Dedicated Servers are hosted in a datacenter environment, a massive amount of bandwidth is available to you for streaming. Keep in mind that bandwidth for Dedicated Servers is typically allotted by the terabyte (TB), although different hosting providers have different servers and specifications. Namecheap, for example, offers up to 100 TB of bandwidth per month.
Data Storage
Remember what was said earlier that before a video or audio can be streamed, it must be read from a file on disk? In this case, the amount of disk data storage on your server is crucial since it tells you how much space you have on it for files. While larger applications require larger data storage amounts, many Dedicated Servers (including Namecheap’s) use solid-state drives (SSDs) with SATA hard-disk drives (HDDs) used for backup.
Some Dedicated Servers now support Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe), a modern storage protocol that works with solid state drives (SSDs) to provide faster input/output (I/O) and much larger data bandwidths. Designed from the ground up, NVMe takes advantage of the performance, low-latency, and parallelism of SSDs. This makes your Dedicated Server perform more work in less time, delivering 2X faster speeds to your website’s audience.
Server Control
We’ve alluded to this in previous sections, but Dedicated Server Hosting gives you complete control over how your server is run and configured, all in an isolated environment. You’re also able to adjust your hardware specifications and even install your own operating system (OS). It’s no wonder why advanced web developers are big fans of Dedicated Servers.
Here, you also have control over what media server software you use, meaning external software applications that come with basic live streaming capabilities and recording features. Our top picks? Check out Emby, FFmpeg, Red5, Plex, and Wowza Streaming Engine. Before you make your decision, we recommend taking a closer look at each to ensure it’s the right one for you.
Server Security
We’ve said it before but we’ll say it again. With your Dedicated Server, you’re the only one who has access to the server so you’re not sharing with anyone else. This means no software vulnerabilities or harmful configurations that can compromise your data. This lets you optimize any features you need for the specific requirements of your website and stored files. Yes, you’re ultimately responsible for how these features are implemented, but this is the beauty of Dedicated Server flexibility.
Take Content Streaming to the Next Level with Namecheap
Whether you’re a blogger who’s new to streaming or you’re a business owner who live streams as a main source of revenue, Dedicated Server Hosting from Namecheap is your best bet to host content and stream. Our 99.99% uptime guarantee means you can rest assured that your website stays up and running without interruptions.
And, since we know that not everyone is super tech-savvy, we’re proud to offer you three levels of Dedicated Server Management (User-Responsible, Basic, and Complete) to choose from.
We also know that a Dedicated Server is a financial investment. That’s why we’ve made it easy to choose from our Entry, Medium or Advanced category levels to match your business needs and budget. In fact, some of our entry-level Dedicated Servers start at just $40/month.
In terms of configuration, each of our Dedicated Servers operates on a separate Cisco/Juniper-powered network that’s connected to Level3, Highwinds, HE, Cogent, and Integra. In layman’s terms? It’s ready to handle any incoming traffic. Some of our advanced Dedicated Servers also include the aforementioned NVMe, to ensure the fastest and highest performance when you’re streaming.
You’ll find that no matter which category level or management level you choose, a Dedicated Server from Namecheap takes your content hosting and streaming to the next level.
Do you currently stream content with your Dedicated Server? Let us know how it’s going!
