Okay - one more question then.

Looking at "Usage this cycle" is that then usage since the last charge or usage since the first of the month?

It should of course in my opinion be since last charge but I'm in doubt because when I open a Report for that application the begin date is the first of the month up till today.

Thanks

Another thing you should probably look into:

I changed a Monthly Limit from $15 to $50. After I logged out and in again it said FREE.

After another logout and login it correctly said $50 though.

Hi,

Currently we have p2p only for audio/video and not data messages.

a) If you are using p2p for audio/video, then you are not charged for that stream. You are charged only for the connection time.

b) Currently we don't have p2p for text chat. But in future when we provide that feature, you won't be charged for text chat for any number of users. However, for audio/video chat, it falls back to hub-spoke the moment its more than 3 people or someone doesn’t have player 10 or firewall.

Thanks

Hironmay Basu

This makes sense to me, though I don't see why messages couldnt be passed in the p2p stream as we do successfully with Stratus.

My concern is really the amount of users that require the fall back to hub-spoke. The difference in cost with an app serving tens of thousands of users could be tremendous.

Assuming we detect and force Flash Player 10.1+ use in our app, what % (very roughly) might we expect to have to fall back due to firewall issues?

By debugging ChatRoulette's code I noticed they've increased their FMS server cluster from 5 to 12 boxes. My guess is there is a pretty large % of fallback for whatever reason.

-jared

First up, for P2P audio/video chat, as long as you're just doing 3 people

or fewer in a room, and they all have permissive firewalls, you'll be fine.

We are adding P2P data, likely within the next 2 months (it's more

complicated for us, since we wanted to fit it properly within our existing

dev model). As Basu says, you won't be charged for P2P usage. I'm making a

note that one of the features we should add in is the ability to prevent a

user from connecting unless they can get RTMFP to work.

  That said, in all cases, you'll still have some control messages sent hub

and spoke (for example, for setting up the peer connections), and you'll

still have connection time charges (RTMFP still requires a persistent

connection to the service, which eats a small portion of our capacity).

   nigel

Hi Eric,

What we have here is a hard limit (3 streams per user, Basu does a good job

in explaining the math as you've quoted him), but it's in the SDK, not the

player. We based this on some empirical testing - we're not dynamically

measuring your bandwidth. I wondered aloud if it made sense to allow

developers to modify that limit, which I think I'm hearing the answer is

yes, we should.

  hope that helps

  nigel

Hi Fang -- the service looks great. I'd like to clarify a point about potential high-volume usage.

We're building a video chat app that could become very high-volume. Hypothetically, let's say we have 1m users, day and night. Each one sends 100 messages per hour and -- each month -- uses 100 MB of bandwidth. Hypothetically again, all the video/audio streaming would go through P2P.

1) Would it really cost $14.5 million per month, or does a 'user minute' register only when there is server activity for a user during a given minute?

2) Do you see these stats below as more or less accurate? [note that messages would be used only for: peering; IM on our site]

$0.01/User*1,000,000Users*24hours*30days=$7,200,000

$0.0001/Message*1,000,000Users*100Messages*24hours*30days=$7,200,000

Thanks for your response, Nigel. I don't think that model will scale for any significant business. As an example, Facebook derives around $2 per year from its users, and it is starting to do a decent job monetizing. Now imagine if it relied on a 3rd party service like LCCS and they proposed taking a cut of 65% of gross revenues. Not realistic.

It seems to me that LCCS pricing is far out of line with FMS pricing -- around 100x more, even if you include Amazon EC2 hosting for FMS -- so I wondered if I am misreading the LCCS pricing?

You are quite right about 20MM users equating to 1MM connections. But what are the advantages of LCCS over FMS (or 'FMS + our own cluster engineering') when the price disparity is so enormous?

Can you answer the following questions about LCCS Pay Per Use Pricing?

Is this version of LCCS only for developing prototypes or doing light development?

How would one be sure of uptime guarantee and is there any sort of technical support available?

I have heard that this environment will be taken offline for 12-24 hours or sometimes a day or two. Is this correct? If so, how can we deploy apps for our customers?

Thanks!