I'm looking to serve videos on my website that are around 15-30 minutes long each. I want to know if using AWS S3 and CloudFront is a good solution for this, as I have never hosted videos on AWS before. I've used Vimeo in the past, but since my new application is entirely on AWS, I want to transition my video hosting there. Is it really as simple as placing the video URL in my frontend app? I'm not an expert in video streaming, but I believe it's better to stream videos in chunks rather than loading the entire video at once. Will CloudFront help with this? Also, considering my app might have around 500 users, is this setup cost-effective?
3 Answers
If you don't need things like transcoding or DRM, then S3 and CloudFront should work just fine for serving your videos! It's pretty straightforward.
You might want to consider other services that offer cheaper bandwidth and video hosting. AWS can be pretty pricey compared to some competitors.
Isn't CloudFront supposed to help with caching and serving videos to keep costs down?
I ran a video platform since 2014 and started with AWS but switched to Mux because AWS became too costly for my needs. If you're happy with Vimeo, it's often best to stick with what works. Moving to AWS just might not be worth the hassle unless you really need to manage everything in one place.
I just want to upload my MP4 files and let users watch them easily.