Hosting blue iris in the cloud
- Thread starter Lee Denton
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tangent
IPCT Contributor
- May 12, 2016
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I doubt it would be cost effective and certainly introduces quite a few points of failure.
How much upload bandwidth do you have to work with? Does your provider have a monthly bandwidth cap?
How much upload bandwidth do you have to work with? Does your provider have a monthly bandwidth cap?
You only think you have no data caps until you start blasting your ISP with non-stop video that doesn't buffer.
On my isolated NIC, my cameras are streaming non-stop 450Mbps worth of data. This is full-on, never stopping to take a breath. Even if someone has a gigabit router, a 3rd of non-buffering 24/7 data will impact its speed and slow your internal system down.
And the ISP will take notice of that non-stop data that doesn't buffer.
I recently moved a few of my cameras to a neighbors house as they had better site-lines for plate reading cameras.
They are on 1gig service with no data caps.
I had 3 cameras sending over their internet mainstream back to my house.
Within days, their ISP told them they had to cut devices called LPR1, LPR2, and Overview from their system or they would cancel their internet.
Now what is scary is how did the ISP know the names of the devices.... yeah we know it is their internet and blah blah blah, but it shows why people VPN because the ISP can see what is happening.
Plus the whole point of BI is to have local control and not be dependent on any outside cloud or other systems, so I doubt anyone would do this.
On my isolated NIC, my cameras are streaming non-stop 450Mbps worth of data. This is full-on, never stopping to take a breath. Even if someone has a gigabit router, a 3rd of non-buffering 24/7 data will impact its speed and slow your internal system down.
And the ISP will take notice of that non-stop data that doesn't buffer.
I recently moved a few of my cameras to a neighbors house as they had better site-lines for plate reading cameras.
They are on 1gig service with no data caps.
I had 3 cameras sending over their internet mainstream back to my house.
Within days, their ISP told them they had to cut devices called LPR1, LPR2, and Overview from their system or they would cancel their internet.
Now what is scary is how did the ISP know the names of the devices.... yeah we know it is their internet and blah blah blah, but it shows why people VPN because the ISP can see what is happening.
Plus the whole point of BI is to have local control and not be dependent on any outside cloud or other systems, so I doubt anyone would do this.
tangent
IPCT Contributor
- May 12, 2016
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It wouldn't end well, but record to the cloud, I'd throw the cameras behind a router with an always on outbound VPN connection to your cloud.
tangent
IPCT Contributor
- May 12, 2016
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What kind of bitrate were you running? At least to me it doesn't seem like say 30-40mbps of streaming video upload should be such a problem for the ISP.
biggen
Known around here
- May 6, 2018
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The problem is if your internet drops then you have no recorded video. I guarantee it would happen eventually and it will be the time you needed it not to happen the most.
Anyone in the security sector who knows what they are doing is always recording locally and moving backups to cloud thereafter.
Anyone in the security sector who knows what they are doing is always recording locally and moving backups to cloud thereafter.
tangent
IPCT Contributor
- May 12, 2016
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Yes, I do REDUNDANT NVR to the cloud.
My strategy is local BI at each site, all cameras, doing AI, alerting, audio & lighting response (homeassistant), etc, the full deal.
For remote redundant backup, I rent a dedicated server w/ Proxmox, running BI in a VM, network through a site to site VPN via Wireguard.
In the cloud, I just record a few cameras and the index page 24/7. I record DIRECT streams from the cameras, I do not re-record the BI stream.
My thought is, if my local BI goes down or is stolen, I will notice quickly and can pull from my cloud backup.
Some considerations:
My strategy is local BI at each site, all cameras, doing AI, alerting, audio & lighting response (homeassistant), etc, the full deal.
For remote redundant backup, I rent a dedicated server w/ Proxmox, running BI in a VM, network through a site to site VPN via Wireguard.
In the cloud, I just record a few cameras and the index page 24/7. I record DIRECT streams from the cameras, I do not re-record the BI stream.
My thought is, if my local BI goes down or is stolen, I will notice quickly and can pull from my cloud backup.
Some considerations:
- Cloud storage (s3-like) pricing is EXPENSIVE.
- For my use case, I would be looking at $5 a day for each day of footage I want to store (based on AWS S3 pricing).
- If I kept 1 day of footage for 1 year, that is $1,300 in storage alone! Not including computer to run BI
- Dedicated servers give you fixed storage, decent compute, and decent ram, for a fixed monthly price. I'm paying ~$30 a month with a Hetzner server auction box
- A dedicated server is going to probably have limited storage and no upgrade options, so you'll only be able to keep a day or two of footage.
- Your ISP needs to be chill. I do 7TB upload a month. Its a local shop and I was able to contact their network engineer and cleared it with them.
Running Blue Iris in the cloud can get expensive fast, especially with bandwidth and storage costs. One way to keep things flexible and secure is using https://ishosting.com/en/vpn to connect your cameras to a remote server without exposing them directly to the internet. This setup helps with security risks and avoids potential issues with ISP restrictions. I’ve used a VPN for remote access, and it makes managing everything a lot easier.
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