In the online media streaming industry, the requirements for network and hardware infrastructure to achieve user satisfaction on reliability, stability and performance hold a much higher stake than most industry. For a bootstrapping startup like ours, financial limits can restrain the business’ infrastructure capabilities, however, the following considerations must not be neglected for the business to steadily and satisfactorily expand over time.

1. Datacenters. Datacenters are quite abundant around the world. However, ensure that your datacenter partner has proper cooling and humidity control, energy redundancy, network availability and redundancy, security systems, and good friendly service. Online businesses rely the most on the datacenters, without them your business will cease to exist no matter how perfect your application or team members are. A good trusted datacenter will ensure the peace of mind for your company and users.

2. Controlled scalability. How scalable is your product has been a hot topic. However, the more important question should be, can you control the scalability of your network with its corresponding applications? Businesses can fail due to the lack of scalability, but this may also mean that there is a significant lack of design planning and execution in the entire project phase, especially before launching. Controlling scalability will ensure you achieve acceptable reliability and stability for your users over time.

3. Integratability. Are you able to integrate and expand continuously over time? Adding more powerful servers and increasing network bandwidths are common solutions. However, it does not solve the problem if your network design and applications do not allow such additions. Integratability is crucial to the scalability of your business application.

4. Bottlenecks. Your bottleneck is your slowest device – may it be your CPU, harddisks or network bandwidth. Bear in mind the priorities of which component is most important over time depends on the role and purpose of your systems. Invest in what is most important in your setup to achieve the accepted performance for your users.