A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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You can get away with a pretty low bitrate for most. As others have said, set the egress upload limit in the app to whatever you prefer, and just be ready to transcode.
Never charge for access to your server in any way. That is officially 100% illegal. If you can't do it without charging, you can't do it
Yeah I wasn’t planning on charging. Legality aside, it’s just a shitty thing to do.
In my area Xfinity cable has decent upload now, though it still trails fiber. Doing a speed test just now I get 2 gigabit down and 300 megabit up and I pay $85/month with a five year price lock. This is a relatively recent phenomenon so worth checking out if you can get a similar package. Prior to this I was getting 25-32 megabit.
I’ve never made my friends or family pay, but prior to getting decent upload bandwidth I did cap remote streams / concurrent transcodes and let people duke it out fist come first serve. Mostly it was fine. I’ve given maybe 15 people access, but only a few are regularly active.
I also keep a small offsite server at a family members house that splits some of my user base and serves as an offsite backup.
Set throttling.
Ideally set it at your egress point so that sessions get throttled only when your max upload is reached.
I have Xfinity now, so uploads are pretty good (300/80), but I used to have Spectrum, which not only cost more but only got about 8 mbps up. My solution was to restrict clients to low bandwidth streams, like 3mbps. I only had a couple users, though, so obviously there's a limit to how far that will scale.
If you can't upgrade or switch providers to increase bandwidth nor throttle clients, I think the only other solution would be time restrictions, but it's really going to depend on your users whether that's effective.
I started self hosting when I had only 100Mbps down/10Mbps up. For about 5 years years I told my friends and family that I didn't have fast upload speeds so if several people were streaming at the same time there could be issues. Beggers cant be choosers, so they got what they got. That being said, I always tried to get smaller files so that less bandwidth was needed and that helped a lot
I lived alone so 100Mbps down/10Mbps up was plenty for me and I wasn't going to upgrade to a faster plan. I also worked from home with those speeds without any issues and I would have continued with that internet plan if I still lived there. My new place includes 1.2Gb down/up so bandwidth isn't the bottleneck for me any longer.
If you're only at 10mbps upload you'll have to be very careful about selecting microsized 1080p (~4-9mbps) or quality 720p (~6-9mbps) encodes, and even then I really wouldn't bother. If you're not able to get any more upload speed from your plan then you'll either have to cancel the idea or host everything from a VPS.
You can go with a VPS and maybe make people chip in for the storage space, but in that case I'd still lean towards either microsized 1080p encodes or 1080p WEB-DL (which are inherently efficient for the size) if you want to have a big content base without breaking the bank. E.g, these prices look pretty doable if you've got people that can chip in: https://hostingby.design/app-hosting/. I'm not very familiar with what VPS options are available or reputable so you'll have to shop around. Anything with a big harddrive should pretty much work, though I'd probably recommend at least a few gigs of RAM just for Jellyfin (my long-running local instance is taking 1.3GB at the moment; no idea what the usual range might be). Also, you likely won't be able to transcode video, so you'll have to be a little careful about what everyone's playback devices support.
Edit: Also, if you're not familiar with microsized encodes, look for groups like BHDStudio, NAN0, hallowed, TAoE, QxR, HONE, PxHD, and such. I know at least BHDStudio, NAN0, and hallowed are well-regarded, but intentionally microsizing for streaming is a relatively new concept, and it's hard to sleuth out who's doing a good job and who's just crushing the hell out of the source and making a mess - especially because a lot of these groups don't even post source<->encode comparisons (I can guess why). You can find a lot of them on TL, ATH, and HUNO, if those acronyms mean anything to you. Otherwise, a lot of these groups post completely publicly as well, since most private trackers do not allow microsizing.
Maybe switching some of them onto a cheap seed box replica would be better? They have high in/out allowances.
Can you be more specific on how fast your upload speeds are?
10 Mbps upload