The reason it is called Icecast is because it was replicating the Shoutcast protocol, so that people with Winamp could play Icecast streams (Nullsoft made both Winamp and Shoutcast). The Shoutcast protocol used what were called ICY responses (which stood for I Can Yell) so they called their Icecast since it made ICY responses too.

This post unlocked that little corner of my memory. Fun!

ps. One of the Icecast guys worked on Ogg Vorbis because he thought that "mp3 sucked" and the other one is now a professor of Computer Science at USC.

We've been using 100TB.com for our audio streaming infrastructure, which is a softlayer reseller. I've been unable to find anyone else that provides better pricing for bandwidth than they do.

All of our Web infrastructure, provisioning, archiving, etc is spread between AWS and Google Cloud though.

Audio broadcasting on the Internet is indeed an interesting field to be in!

So, digitalocean gives you ~30 users capacity? I think hetzner offers 1Gbit internet without quota which would serve thousands of users.

Is that how broadcasting works on the internet?

Is there not a more efficient non-proprietary protocol for broadcasting on the internet?