The Personal Edition

The Personal edition of the Communication Server is great for a development environment or for small-scale communication solutions. Applications for internal use or to keep in touch with friends and family are also good candidates for this edition. For almost a tenth of the Professional edition price, you have 10 simultaneous connections and 1 megabit-per-second transfer speed. What does that mean? Up to 10 people can be connected at any one time. The bandwidth limitation for this edition will be reached if your application is streaming a 100k/sec video clip to 10 remote clients . In this example, the server is sending each user a 100k stream. This will reach the upper bandwidth limit of this edition if there are 10 users connected. Bandwidth will be discussed in Chapter 7, "STEP 7: Streaming Video with NetStream()."

If you intend to use the Communication Server for a larger-scale solution, such as a public web cast of a rock concert or have your corporate AGM web cast to shareholders and employees or even offer it as a shared hosting service, you have two options: You can purchase additional Personal editions and chain them together to increase bandwidth and user capacity or you can purchase the Professional edition. The process of chaining servers together will be presented in Chapter 11, "Server-Side ActionScript (SSAS)."