Is video hosting financially sustainble for FSCI?
Akshay
Public
Seen by 82
First, some statistics about videos
Item |
Figure |
Number of unique vidoes |
75 |
Number of video files with transcoding to different sizes |
378 |
Total disk usage |
45 GB |
Average size per unique video |
600MB |
Hetzner volume storage cost |
0.044 Euro per GB per month |
Please see the breakdown of costs, including per average video cost in this table.
Item |
Cost per month in Euro |
Cost per month in INR |
Cost per year in INR |
2023 budget for videos |
9000 |
||
2024 budget for videos |
11000 |
||
Hetzner plan for AMD 2 cores + 40GB HDD + 2GB RAM (CPX 11) |
4.35 |
455 |
5460 |
Hetzner cost for 100 GB volume |
4.44 |
465 |
5580 |
|
Average video cost (75 unique videos) = (5460+5580)/75 |
147.2 |
||
|
Theoretical minimum cost for average video (@600 MB per video) =600/1000 * 0.044 euro |
0.0264 |
2.75 |
33 |
Average video cost, if we reach 160 videos in 100GB =(5460+5580)/160 |
69 |
||
Average video cost, if we reach 1600 videos in 1000 GB =(5460+55800)/1600 |
38.28 |
||
Total projected cost for running with 1600 videos (with same server plan) |
48.79 |
5100 |
61200 |
The 2023, 2024 figures are from https://codema.in/d/VkCybRTY/fsci-services-accounting
Presently, although we use 45 GB only for 75 unique videos, we have reserved a 100 GB volume, and the machine runs at almost the same cost as total storage. So, for each video, we have to pay about 4 times the theoretical minimum. We can never achieve the theoretical minimum cost, as we will always have some incidental overhead.
If at all we increase the number of videos by about 20 times, we will still have to pay about 40 rupees per video per year and a total of about 61,200 rupees every year.
I don't think the economics works out for FSCI.
Poll Created Wed 24 Sep 2025 12:40PM
Sunset videos.fsci.in Closed Wed 1 Oct 2025 1:00PM
Thanks for participating in the consensus process. It is quite clear that a lot of people want it to continue but are forced to agree to sunset. Because of this, as far as the question of FSCI maintaining peertube I think the consensus is to not. There're a couple of people (representing more people) who say that they'll take over the instance because they've also been wanting to set up an instance. As of now it is unclear whether this is a viable option or not (and how this effort is different from the past efforts). I've set a review date for this poll as 31 Oct 2025. By then I hope there is a group that emerges with a plan on taking this over from FSCI, or with a request to extend the review further. If nothing good happens, we will sunset the peertube instance, and redirect video links to different hosts (if there are other mirrors for the video), or to a static copy on a shared server.
What is the decision you need to make?
Let's sunset videos.fsci.in (peertube instance) as financially unsustainable as was the original plan, as per https://wiki.fsci.in/Videos.fsci.in
Why is this important?
Money saved is money earned. Instead of asking for 11,000 per year (as per present cost) and maintaining 75-160 videos indefinitely on a peertube instance, we can shut it down and use the developer effort and money elsewhere.
What are you asking people to do?
Give consent for sunsetting peertube, otherwise come up with a reason why it makes sense to invest in this.
For this proposal to pass, we need the majority of members to vote Agree.
If you Disagree, say why and what needs to change for you to Agree.
Results
| Results | Option | Votes | % of votes cast | % of eligible voters | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
Agree | 14 | 88 | 5 |
|
| Abstain | 1 | 6 | 0 |
|
|
| Disagree | 0 | 0 | 0 | ||
| Block | 1 | 6 | 0 |
|
|
| Undecided | 252 | 0 | 94 |
|
16 of 268 votes cast (5% participation)
Akshay
Wed 24 Sep 2025 12:40PM
Please also see https://codema.in/d/4SzerK5H/maintenance-of-peertube-instance-
Pirate Praveen
Wed 24 Sep 2025 12:40PM
One less thing to worry/pay since we did not get enough maintainers.
Pirate Praveen Wed 24 Sep 2025 3:37PM
I did not just mean technical volunteers, people can raise funds too, if it was important. If you don't host anything, you save the whole money we spend on hosting too. Basically, different people may be motivated by different services. It is not necessarily same people have to care about all services. People who are willing to donate to one service don't necessarily be donating to other services. Last time we got about 1lakh grant from FOSS United, now we are not even finding people to submit a grant request.
Ravi Dwivedi
Wed 24 Sep 2025 12:40PM
This doesn't seem to be financially viable
harish k
Wed 24 Sep 2025 12:40PM
If we dont have a plan / roadmap to make this service finacially viable, better to shut down it for now
mujeebcpy
Wed 24 Sep 2025 12:40PM
ya this is unwanted expense. there should be an option to download these videos.
fugata
Wed 24 Sep 2025 12:40PM
There's a group of 6 people interested in maintaining Fedi services for Indians. That includes videos.fsci.in. We're about to begin a crowdfunding campaign, and this sunsetting discussion should only happen if we don't manage to raise enough funds.
Akshay Tue 30 Sep 2025 7:06AM
@fugata It'd be best to set a deadline for how long this should be blocked for.
Akshay · Wed 24 Sep 2025 1:28PM
@Pirate Praveen it is not about maintainers, it is about money. If your decision is based on maintainers, you have to rethink.