Creating a Video Hosting Site - Costs

Newsite

Hi guys,

I’m just wondering about video hosting sites and costs. Say one wanted to create a site where members could upload short (3 minutes max in duration) videos – would this be very expensive in terms of bandwidth/server space? Let’s say you wanted to allow a max of 50 2-3 min videos to be uploaded per month – how much would you need to be budgeting monthly and up front in terms of hosting would anyone know?

RoyalMarine

the biggest drain on bandwidth would be people viewing the video's.

say you create a site, host it at home, and allow people to upload 3min video's.

you have 30mb bb with upc.

for 1 person, this would be fairly quick.

however, imagine 50 people viewing that link at the one time.
thats where your bandwidth gets eaten up.

server space for 3 min video's wouldnt be too extreme. depends once again how many people use the site.

10 people uploading 3 min video wont be too much.
but 500 people uploading a 3 min video etc would quickly add up.

best bet is start shopping for the best hosting package unless your in a position to host it yourself at home which would be cheaper if your bb connection could handle it.

conor.hogan.2

Any reason not to use youtube, justintv, ustream etc?

You can set them to private, and that is most likely more secure than a home built solution.

fergalr

Unless you've a really compelling reason to the contrary, just use youtube private videos; or, if that won't work, "Google Video for business" http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/video.html is a paid video app.

DonkeyStyle \o/

I hear transcoding uploaded video on the server-side (to make it suitable for playing in flash, etc.) is a large factor too.
I think it's safe enough to say you won't be doing this on a shared hosting account.

Collumbo

RoyalMarine wrote: »

the biggest drain on bandwidth would be people viewing the video's.

say you create a site, host it at home, and allow people to upload 3min video's.

you have 30mb bb with upc.

for 1 person, this would be fairly quick.

however, imagine 50 people viewing that link at the one time.
thats where your bandwidth gets eaten up.

server space for 3 min video's wouldnt be too extreme. depends once again how many people use the site.

10 people uploading 3 min video wont be too much.
but 500 people uploading a 3 min video etc would quickly add up.

best bet is start shopping for the best hosting package unless your in a position to host it yourself at home which would be cheaper if your bb connection could handle it.

A few fair points here but I did a few tests a year ago on this. I used a €5/month shared hosting account, kept web page size small in terms of kb. I place all stuff that didn't need to be on the actual hosting account on amazon s3 (like images, javascript, swfplayer), and videos on cloudfront. Cloudfront solves your bandwidth problems straight away... you only pay for what's downloaded/uploaded. The choice of video player is important but I used flowplayer with RTMP. Bandwidth won't be affected if you are uploading/viewing from streamed content from a content provider. you could also use someone like MAXCDN for video content as their pricing is more predictable... if you are ever lucky enough to hit those volumes on your site.

there is more work here than you think if you want to use a proper CDN but it is worth the effort. Amazon have all the code samples in c#, java, python etc... and support forums are quite good.