How an Independent Publisher Streams 1080p Live Podcasts on a Dedicated Server

When unpredictable traffic spikes can mean the difference between reaching an audience and disappearing from view, the underlying infrastructure has to deliver. One long-time InMotion Hosting customer, an independent publisher whose content network draws between five and seven million monthly visitors, broadcasts full 1080p live podcasts directly from their own server. After 14 years on InMotion Hosting’s dedicated server platform, they have settled the question of where their digital home belongs.

This customer’s environment runs on an InMotion Hosting CC-2000 high-capacity dedicated server with substantial memory headroom, scalable network capacity, and fully owned underlying hardware.

The Challenge

The site faces scale-related demands that very few independent publishers encounter. Traffic spikes come without warning. During the pandemic, monthly visitors jumped from one million to 2.5 million in the span of weeks, with server load climbing into the double digits during peak events. The customer live streams in full 1080p three times a week to live audiences that sometimes reach 2,000 concurrent listeners, and they host those broadcasts on their own infrastructure rather than offloading them to YouTube or another third-party platform.

That setup demands constant readiness. There is no schedule for when demand will spike; only the certainty that it will. Before InMotion Hosting, this customer had cycled through several providers that could not keep pace. Repeated server crashes and dead-end technical support left them looking for something different: a real dedicated server and a team that would pick up the phone when something broke.

A more recent test came when the customer migrated their content delivery network from Cloudflare to Fastly. Fastly’s proprietary VCL snippets created a difficult cache-clearing problem, and the failure had a compounding downstream effect. The customer’s Jetpack newsletter, which delivers every new post to roughly 17,000 subscribers and runs three to five times per day, stopped going out. Articles were publishing, the cache was not invalidating, and the email pipeline that drove much of their traffic broke down.

The Solution

“People are getting away from articles. They want to see podcasting live. If you want to be a live podcaster on your own site, InMotion’s the place to do it.” – InMotion Hosting customer

The CC-2000 high-capacity dedicated server gave the customer’s environment the memory headroom and bare metal performance required to handle their traffic profile. Because the hardware sits inside InMotion Hosting’s privately owned infrastructure rather than a hyperscale public cloud, capacity behaves predictably under load. The platform has accommodated the network’s growth across multiple hardware refresh cycles, with the customer upgrading to a new server roughly every three years.

Resolving the Fastly cache issue required something hyperscalers do not offer: hours of phone time with engineers who treat troubleshooting as a conversation. Working with the InMotion Solutions team, including Samuel and Dakota under the leadership of manager Parag, the customer walked through the problem across multiple calls totaling several hours. The breakthrough came when one of the technicians made a comment that prompted the customer to check a setting on a specific WordPress plugin. That setting was the root cause. Once corrected, the cache cleared properly, and the newsletter resumed delivery to all 17,000 subscribers.

This customer has worked with InMotion Solutions across years of issues, building relationships with multiple generations of the team. Today, Samuel, Dakota, Muhammad, and Parag are among those they rely on. The preference for phone support over chat, in particular, shapes how they handle outages.

This Client Spotlight is a promotional feature based on an interview with the customer. The content has been prepared by InMotion Hosting’s marketing team in collaboration with the featured business. The featured business may have received compensation or other incentives in connection with this spotlight.

The views, opinions, experiences, and statements expressed in this spotlight are those of the customer and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of InMotion Hosting or its employees. InMotion Hosting does not endorse or guarantee the products, services, business practices, or claims of the featured customer. The fact that InMotion Hosting hosts the customer’s website does not constitute an endorsement.

All information is provided for general informational purposes only and should not be considered professional advice. Results may vary.