What no of concurrent connections can each server serv?

Question

Ok we're a startup and currently thinking about whether to use flash media streaming server or red5, or progressive streaming with lighttpd.
In order to make a decision I would like to know how many concurrent streams can flash media server server stream until one has to purchase another license. Do any of you guys have some numbers.
We will be streaming mp3 at low bit rates, service will be hosted within AWS EC2 (with whatever instances are available there). So if you can post some performance specs that would be great....
Oddly enough Adobe Sales does not even know the answer... I have heard rumors that high number of concurrent connections is not a really a feature that this product is developed towards.
Thanks for you answers.

Answer 1

I'd do some more research before commiting to EC2/S3 at all. I'd also confirm that comment about Wowza streaming from S3... I've never worked with it, but if you're streaming, chances are S3 is just storage, and you're actually streaming from EC2 (I don't think you can run an application on S3... but maybe I'm wrong there)
The trouble is, regardless of the software, you're still in competition for bandwidth. There's only so much capacity at the network interface of each shared server, and if you happen to land on a busy server, you may find there isn't enough to go around. For stateless applications like HTTP request/response, that's fine, but for apps that require statefull client/server connections, bandwidth and latency issues can prove catastrophic.
The biggest problem I have with running a streaming server on EC2 (virtualization issues aside), is that they won't disclose hardware or network specs. So, while you can be sure you'll have the memory and processor allocation, it's a crapshoot when it comes to disk time and bandwidth, as you have no real idea how many other instances you're sharing a server with, or what those other instances are doing in terms of bandwidth and disk usage.
While I don't know any of the specs on the cloudfront service, I suspect those servers are load balanced in such a way that bandwidth is accounted for. In the general population EC2 servers, that's not the case.
My advice... really research this before you make your deployment decisions. I've come to find that while scaling out is a bit more challenging, dedicated hardware and bandwidth isn't all that much more expensive than EC2, and when you go dedicated, you can actually count on your resources being available to you.