Ask HN: What is the best solution for storing and serving user uploaded video?

1 points by akritrime 7y ago ↗ HN

I am working on an app where users can upload few minutes long videos. This is my first time I am building something like this and I wanted some advice on how I should go about implementing it. I understand storing media in DB is not the ideal solution and using something like Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage would be better. So what should I know before making a decision? It would be a youtube style app where certain users can upload videos and everyone can check it out. The current tech stack I am leaning towards is a NodeJs app with PSQL and Firebase Cloud Storage for storing the actual media files. Does this sound sensible? what are my other options?

3 comments

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Findeton 7y ago ↗

If you want cheap storage, check out backblaze. Otherwise use s3. I want to do something similar but I need very custom permission/authentication handling so I’m storing things in s3 and using ec2 instances as a proxy, which can also help with caching s3 calls (I don’t want to use Cloud Front). In these ec2 instances I basically have a custom Nginx configuration and that’s it.

akritrime 7y ago ↗

> (I don’t want to use Cloud Front)

Why? Is this just for cost saving purposes or are there some known flaws?

For me it's costs saving and not depending on any AWS specific technology.