Friday, August 20, 2010

The monthly bill

Has anyone ever wondered what RadioReference's monthly costs are to provide our services? I figured I would take a moment to share with the community what we pay each month in hosting expenses. We obviously have other expenses, like taxes, payroll, commissions, etc, but our largest expense is our Web hosting hosts (servers, bandwidth, etc).

Our primary Web hosting partner is Amazon Web Services, which provides a fantastic cloud computing model which is critical for our ability to scale up and down based on demand, and pay only for what we use. We have also partnered with ServerBeach to provide a server external to Amazon Web Services for mail and monitoring activities.

Below is our latest invoice for the month of July's hosting on Amazon Web Services... (click the picture to see the invoice full size)

That's right, right about $8,285.00. We also paid ServerBeach approximately $200 for a server hosted with them. That means on a typical busy month we are looking at ~ $8500/month in hosting and bandwidth costs.

How does all this break down?

- $2700/month in server costs (web, database, archive, audio, and management servers)
- $1300/month in storage costs (audio archives, backups, databases, files etc)
- $4500/month in bandwidth (all those audio feeds)

Hopefully this gives a good perspective as to what it costs to run a high traffic, bandwidth intensive Web property.

Next up... our technical architecture. Ever wondered how many servers we have, what they do, and what software we run? Stay tuned!

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Coming in early June, Premium Feed Broadcaster Offering

We are excited to announce that in early June we will release a premium feed broadcaster offering. This is primarily intended for public safety agencies and commercial entities, however any feed broadcaster could upgrade their feed. The features include:

1) 90 day archive retention
2) Ability to automatically trim dead air from archives
3) Brand free set of Web players
4) No ads on your Web players or feeds
5) User defined lead-in audio feature
6) Private Feed support with delegated administration (you can restrict access to your feed to only users that you specify)
7) Complete access to all mount points and server details - do what you want with your feed, anywhere, anytime.
8) Full archive access via API to display archive files and lists on your sites/systems.
9) Full downloadable statistics

Our current offerings will not change, and you reserve the right to switch between being a normal RR feed broadcaster or a premium broadcaster at any time.

The cost for this offering will be $14.95/month per feed.

Look for more details coming soon, including the release date.

Friday, February 12, 2010

Listening to RadioReference Live Audio Feeds using the Logitech SqueezeBox



As you probably know, RadioReference has over 1800+ live audio feeds of public safety communications from all over the world. With the recent release of the ScannerBox plug-in for the Logitech Squeezebox, you can now listen to all of those feeds directly from this full featured Wifi enabled music player.

If you aren't familiar with the Logitech Squeezebox, this device is a dedicated internet radio station player. With the release of the ScannerBox plug-in, you can now instantly listen to all of RadioReference's live audio feeds on this great "appliance."

For more information, on the plug-in, see the links below and watch the YouTube video.

ScannerBox Plug In
Logitech Squeezebox

Thursday, February 11, 2010

RadioReference and Incident Page Network (IPN) Announce Incident Syndication Partnership

RadioReference is pleased to announce that we have formed a partnership with Incident Page Network (IPN), the world's premier incident notification network, to syndicate incident alerts on RadioReference Live Audio County pages. Most incidents displayed will be delayed up to 2 hours, however critical and large scale incidents will be displayed in real time.

In addition, existing IPN subscribers will be soon be able to associate their RadioReference.com Username with their IPN profile, allowing all incidents to be displayed on RadioReference.com pages in real time for existing IPN subscribers.

More details and information on this partnership can be seen here:

Incident Page Network - The RadioReference Wiki

These new features will be rolled out during the evening of Monday, February 8th 2010

Enjoy!