Improving a Plex setup

1

I have a Hetzner SB34 I use for Plex. Now that I’m reaching full capacity, I was thinking of improving my setup along with the possible addition of drives or just push them off to a GDrive account.

I do need transcoding, and the Hetzner dedi works wonders for it. However, routing to Asia (I’m in the Philippines) is horrible. I’m currently looking at some options to fix this issue:

  1. Keep the Hetzner dedi, and put an nginx proxy in between me and the Plex server (somewhere where my routing is decent, like a Singapore-based VPS, provided that that VPS has a decent route to Hetzner)
  2. Get a dedicated core VPS from somewhere (like BuyVM) and keep all my media on a GDrive mounted via rclone

Would putting a proxy between the Hetzner-based Plex server and me give me better results, or is it worth it to just get a different VPS/Dedi altogether?

I’m a bit new to streaming, so pardon the naivety on this one.

2

I stream mostly from my Hetzner dedi myself despite from being from the Phil myself. I don’t think there is any improvement via the Cloudflare method (at least from my experience). I do provide VPS from the Philippines hosted from a certain Data Center in Marikina (1GBps Downlink, 250 MBps Uplink). It’s definitely faster to stream from there (but my transcodes require more power so I stream from my dedi in Hetzner instead)… If you only have a need for 1080p transcodes below and you’re the only one using it (no other concurrent connections), maybe you’re interested to get space from one of my Xeon Gold Dedis there.

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3

Yep, the Cloudflare method doesn’t work, especially when I think they won’t allow you to cache your Plex setup on their proxy.

Got any links to the DC you mentioned? I’d love to take a look.

4

https://eastern.com.ph/ and have another one on another local DC in Makati but I won’t mention that one anymore since that one’s already obvious.

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5

Get a cheaper Hetzner dedi (there’s a 4770 for roughly 27 dollars right now, apparently), a GSuite subscription and a M247/Cogent based VPS in Asia (cheapest providers in Asia, BW wise). I believe FDCServers, OneVPS and Digital-VM are popular providers who use those networks exclusively.

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6

I’m based in Singapore and zero issues with playback from Hetzner (I know SG has much better international connectivity being a major fibre landing site), maybe try a cheap VPS in SG like Vultr / DO as a proxy for hetzner, you should benefit from the good international connectivity from SG and the fairly small distance from SG to PH (there is a ton of undersea fibre cables from SG to PH)

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7

And may I ask why is that? Why don’t you just mount the GDrive on the Hetzner server you mentioned?

9

Originally I assumed that having a proxy between me and my Hetzner box wouldn’t change anything, so I had that in mind when I was thinking I needed to change providers.

Turns out, Hetzner + Cloudflare (with the no-caching page rules) work great and solved my routing problem.

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