Understanding the Pay As You Go prices.

Support

Level 1 Support
Staff member
We offer a 'Pay As You Go' payment system which is much like topping up a mobile phone. This provides the freedom of not having to pay a monthly subscription fee. You essentially buy bandwidth only as and when you need it, this bandwidth will then roll over each month to use. This payment plan is ideal for infrequent broadcasters.

Case Study - Monthly vs Pay As You Go :

'Acme Radio' wants a radio server with a capacity of 500 listeners. They also want to stream at a bitrate of 128 kbps. This could potentially cost them a fair amount of money each month for a 128 kbps / 500 Listener capacity server with one of our competitors.

With our 'Pay As You Go' system you can have this service set up for as little as a single payment of $5 for 10 GB of listener bandwidth and a 500 listener capacity all without a monthly subscription / contract. You then just top up your accounts bandwidth as and when you need to.

Its also worth bearing in mind that your listener count will often fluctuate. So by using our 'Pay As You Go' plan you are only ever paying for the bandwidth that you use. Some monthly systems can essential waste your bandwidth (and therefore your money) unless you are filling the maximum listener capacity all of the time.

'Pay As You Go' systems also allow you to scale your radio. So when you are just starting out you can have the capacity to grow your listener base without wasting money on monthly bandwidth contracts or having to upgrade your server each time you need to increase your listener capacity.

Case Study - Bandwidth Usage :

People often ask us to estimate how much bandwidth they will use. This really depends on how many listeners you get, what bitrate you are streaming at and how long the listeners stay connected to your stream for.

So for example, if you were streaming at 64 kbps for 3 hours to 20 listeners connected for a full 3 hours, the bandwidth used would be 1.65 GB (around $0.83 in bandwidth fees).

You can work out how much your bandwidth fees will be with our bandwidth calculator here.

We also offer discounts (up to 33% off) on bandwidth purchases above 10GB so your costs can be even less.
 
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Bandwidth / Listeners

Hi there,

We are shortly about to go live with our station, but although we have just bought more bandwidth, I think we initially began by limiting ourselves to just 25 listeners.

I don't want to tempt fate, but i we have nearly 2000 followers on Twitter just based on our concept before anyone has heard a song yet, so i feel as though we need more capacity.

Will this happen automatically with the increased bandwidth purchase or do we need to do something?

Cheers
 

Support

Level 1 Support
Staff member
Hi rocketradio

No, this is not done automatically, but with PAYG bandwidth you can have as many listeners as you choose and at any bitrate. Just let us know how many listeners you would like us to increase this to and we will change this for you. 8)
 
Hi rocketradio

No, this is not done automatically, but with PAYG bandwidth you can have as many listeners as you choose and at any bitrate. Just let us know how many listeners you would like us to increase this to and we will change this for you. 8)

thanks for that. Should we always over-estimate though?

what would happen if we ask you for say 500 listeners but we actually get say 750? would the station crash? or would it automatically adjust the PAYG cost?
 

Support

Level 1 Support
Staff member
We have a listener cap of 500 listeners. If your station reached this limit then no further listeners would be able to connect. Changes to the amount of listeners on an account can only be made by us. The system does not do this automatically. 8)
 
We have a listener cap of 500 listeners. If your station reached this limit then no further listeners would be able to connect. Changes to the amount of listeners on an account can only be made by us. The system does not do this automatically. 8)

Sorry, I misunderstood you.

So can we ask you now to increase our listeners to say 250 for now, just in case?

What do you recommend we do if we are regularly achieving 500 listeners?
 

Support

Level 1 Support
Staff member
Hi rocketradio, We have increased this to 250 listeners for you. You will need to restart your server for the changes to take effect.

500 listeners is quite a substantial figure in terms of Internet Radio, even some of our most popular stations are not hitting this listener limit. See how you guys get on with the 250 cap and should you require for this to be increased then please just let us know. 8)
 

philip evans

New Member
hi ,8 i dont think i neeed 500 right now could i get it down to 150 for now and i will contact you iff i am going to go over this amount

Regards phil..
 

Support

Level 1 Support
Staff member
hi ,8 i dont think i neeed 500 right now could i get it down to 150 for now and i will contact you iff i am going to go over this amount

Regards phil..

Hi Phil,

Sure no problem. We have dropped your listeners down to 150 for you.
 
Is PAYG bitrate limited to 128 kbps? When I tried to put 256kbps,Shoutcast DSP starts to reconnecting after a minute.
 
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Support

Level 1 Support
Staff member
Is PAYG bitrate limited to 128 kbps? When I tried to put 256kbps,Shoutcast DSP starts to reconnecting after a minute.

Shoutcast limit the servers to 128 kbps unless you pay them unfortunately. It's not a limit we impose. More info here:
 
Shoutcast limit the servers to 128 kbps unless you pay them unfortunately. It's not a limit we impose. More info here:
That's interesting because there is a notice in your monthly plan about 320 kbps.
 

Support

Level 1 Support
Staff member
That's interesting because there is a notice in your monthly plan about 320 kbps.
Yes, this is not a limit imposed by us unfortunately. You can use an Icecast server if you wish to not have to pay Shoutcast for streaming above 128 kbps.
 
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