Cutting Media Hosting Costs by 90% with AWS
Efficient Media Management and Scalable Content Delivery
Managing large media files without skyrocketing costs is a challenge many businesses face. A leading summer camp operator in Texas was spending nearly $100,000 annually on media storage and delivery—using Rackspace and Cloudinary. KnackForge stepped in with a scalable, cloud-native solution to reduce costs and simplify operations.
Challenges
A Costly and Inefficient Media Hosting Setup
The client’s media infrastructure faced three key pain points:
High Costs: Combined annual expenses from Rackspace and Cloudinary reached around $100,000.
Upload & CDN Limitations: Rackspace’s file upload restrictions and CDN challenges hurt performance and scalability.
Operational Complexity: Managing separate services for storage and delivery was cumbersome and inefficient.
The Solution
KnackForge designed a modern AWS-based media pipeline to streamline and optimize content delivery:
Automated Video Conversion: Leveraged AWS Elemental MediaConvert to automatically convert source videos into MP4 and M3U8 formats, eliminating manual processing.
Fast, Efficient Content Delivery: Replaced Cloudinary with AWS CloudFront, enabling low-latency media streaming directly from Amazon S3.
Scalable, Cost-Effective Storage: Migrated all media to Amazon S3 with multipart upload support. Implemented S3 Lifecycle Policies to move older files to Infrequent Access storage—drastically reducing costs.
The Impact
A Costly And Inefficient Media Hosting Setup
Client’s existing media hosting and delivery setup had three major pain points:
Significant Cost Savings: Eliminated reliance on Rackspace and Cloudinary, saving tens of thousands in annual infrastructure costs.
Simplified Media Management: Unified storage and delivery into a single, automated pipeline.
Improved Performance: Faster uploads, optimized streaming, and a system built to scale.
Technologies Used:
- AWS Elemental MediaConvert
- AWS CloudFront
- AWS S3
- Python
- AWS Lambda