Saving hosting traffic using Relays

How works relay feature

Questa pagina è disponibile anche in lingua italiana

Introduction

All classic hosting services shows, in the plan listing, a monthly traffic limit for the site hosted.

It's a fairly huge quantity, such as 4, 8, 10 or also 50GB. Normally, it's difficult to reach this traffic limit with a normal web site, but can be only if there are thousand of daily page views.

But, when streaming, the genaretd traffic increase in a big manner, depending on number of listeners served.

Also, it's true that the bigger part of web sites doesn't reach a minimal fraction of the available traffic: so, why don't use this unused traffic for the own stream?

The Relays

The solution is the relay feature. A relay is a second streaming server that mirrors exactly the stream of the main server.

Technically, it is a normal PicoStreamer setup whith a normal and working account created.

The idea is using low traffic consuming sites to make them working as relays.

First experiments

For experiment, we can activate a relay on the own same server, simply using a second username. So, from admin panel, add a user called "relaytest" with password "relaypass".

Now start streaming using the main user. After some second, you will see that also the user "relaytest" is online and the stream info will show a leading [R].

Try to listen the user "relaytest" and you will see that is streaming the same signal of main user.

Simply!

This a test that, in fact, it's useless for the traffic saving because the relay domain is the same of the main streaming server.

In a real situation, you should activate relays on different servers (maybe a friend's web site and maybe installing PicoStreamer on the fly using the Online Installer) to share the used resources.

Listeners side

Once setup a relay, you need to publish the new link to listeners?. NO, picoreader.cgi script knows that relays are active and automatically redirect listeners to the new server as soon as the own user reached the allowed maximum number of listeners.

In this way, keeping low the max number of listeners on the own server, you will auto share the traffic over all relays.

Relay chains

There is no limit to the structure or the number of relays networks that you can enable: a server can have one or more relay and each relay, on his own, can have an indefinite number of relay's relay, and so on...

Questions? Use the forum