Why Red5 Pro is Hosting Agnostic

It was all so perfect. You and your friends pile into your old van and cruise your way down the bumpy road winding deep into the woods. The long, hard drive complete, you pull up to a pretty little cabin. There’s nothing to do but kick back by the fire and enjoy your vacation. Everything is going to be just fine. That is until the dark, ominous, storm clouds roll in. A thunderous gust of wind throws a giant tree across the road, blocking the only way out. You’re trapped! If only you had developed a better escape route. Your blood runs cold as you spy your friend pulling out an old guitar. Oh no, it’s so out of tune. Make it stop! No-NOOOOO!!

Such is the potential situation faced by companies who host their entire product upon a SaaS platform. Well, maybe not quite so dramatic and life threatening but at least profit-threatening. Take for example the story that HomeAutomation recently shared. According to them, after building a very successful software application, “We got ourselves into a situation that when a service we relied upon changed how they do things, our bill was suddenly increased by over 7,000%.” When you build an application completely on top of third-party architecture you can fall victim to this situation: a service trap.

The fact is, you have to host your application somewhere. Considering that most a SaaS providers wrap up hosting services into their product, you have little to no control over your hosting. So if changes are made to the way in which the providers deal with things like traffic flow or data usage, then you have little to no control over the potential changes in price and performance.

With this in mind, we designed Red5 Pro to allow you to host your own application as you see fit. Live-streaming video can be hard so we do most of the work for you, but we want you to be able to maintain control over how it fits into your application as a whole. As such, Red5 Pro has remained hosting agnostic and has a flexible API that can lock into any back-end. This enables a greater degree of customization and the freedom to implement your own hosting or switch providers.

Another company that has picked up on this logically growing trend, the award winning Turbonomic, also employs a hosting agnostic model with their Autonomic Platform. Both Turbonomic and Red5 Pro understand that this allows for greater efficiency in autoscaling and a better performing product.

All in all, this increased flexibility enables users to choose whatever hosting solution fits their needs. Considering this is a major improvement over stapling a one size fits all pattern to every package, it will come as no surprise when more and more products adopt this same model.

How would you like to host your Red5 Pro application? Let us know how we can help you build your project with a quick call.