Shoutcast Hosting

[bpowers84]

I am writing to inquire as to the Shoutcast Hosting, when you purchase shoutcast hosting I understand it comes with a specific listener limit for instance your lowest plan comes with a listener limit of 999 listeners at any given time, is it possible to have more than 999 listeners at any given time, and is this directly related to bandwidth for instance if I purchase unlimited bandwidth will I be able to have more listeners?

[AndrewGlow]

Hello,

Theoretically you may have number of simultaneous connections more then 999, but there's a problem, not in bandwidth but in connection speed. Let's take 1000 listeners connected to your radio station simultaneously with 128 kbps quality. 1000 x 128 kbps = 128 mbits per second. That's the Internet connection server should have just for you. And shoutcast packages assume that you are sharing server with other customers. If everyone would use for such huge numbers of listeners shared shoutcast servers - they all would fail.
Having 999 of listeners at one moment means that your total number of listeners should be like 20-50 thousands, not speaking about visitors of the website. For such purposes you should look for Dedicated servers:
Cheap Dedicated Servers, Cheap Dedicated Hosting, Best Support

So to sum up, number of maximum listeners at a moment doesn't depend on bandwidth, but number of listeners during the month does. But it also depends on how much time your listeners will be connected to your station.

If you are speaking about 1000 of listeners during a month, let's suppose that each of them will listen to your radio in average for 30 hours during one month (1 hour a day). In a month we have 24*30 = 720 hours at all. Now 720/30 = 24 - number of users in average that will listen to your radio simultaneously.

Now let's calculate bandwidth for 25 users @ 128k:

25 (users)*128 (kbit per second) *60(seconds)*60(minutes)*24(hours)*30(days)/8(bits in a kbyte)/1024(kbytes in a mb)/1024(mbytes in a gig) = 988,7695 gigs/mo

So if you'll have 1000 of listeners that will listen to your radio in average for 1 hour a day, you'll need 1000 Gb of bandwidth (that's Huge SC Server $100.00 per month)