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How To Deal With Bandwidth Issues For Video Sites?

by JDSalinger
11 replies
I am looking to start up a video site that will have an increasing number of videos on it where each video has 2 to 3 hours of recorded video on each. My question is what things do I need to think about in terms of bandwidth issues. Would a regular business account from a hosting company like say Hostgator be sufficient as they claim to offer unlimited bandwidth or do i need to get some type of specialized hosting? What do others use who have similar businesses? What do the big video tutorial companies use?
#bandwidth #deal #issues #sites #video
  • Profile picture of the author Mark Alan
    Probably not. If your going to self-host a lot of videos that are more than a couple of minutes in length you are going to need hosting or your own server that is set up to specifically handle streaming video. Typically it is very expensive compared to regular old hosting. Otherwise your site visitors won't be able to fast forward to the point in the video they want like they can do on YouTube.




    Originally Posted by JDSalinger View Post

    I am looking to start up a video site that will have an increasing number of videos on it where each video has 2 to 3 hours of recorded video on each. My question is what things do I need to think about in terms of bandwidth issues. Would a regular business account from a hosting company like say Hostgator be sufficient as they claim to offer unlimited bandwidth or do i need to get some type of specialized hosting? What do others use who have similar businesses? What do the big video tutorial companies use?
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    • Profile picture of the author Indecision
      I actually spoke to hostgator recently about this regarding a site using clipbucket, if you want to set up a proper streaming video site on a hostgator account then you will need a VPS server 5 package which starts at roughly $99 a month. Much better oof looking elsewhere.
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      • Profile picture of the author Brandon Tanner
        You definitely want to use a CDN for something like that, especially if you're serving up any significant volume.

        Something like Amazon S3.
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  • Profile picture of the author Nate Simms
    You could always set up an Amazon S3 account with their CDN (cloud delivery network).

    You pay $0.125 per GB up to your first TB.

    So, say you run upwards of 99 GBs of video a month ... you will only pay $12 for all that system usage. That is something that your "run of the mill" hosting providers (ie., HostGator) simply cannot offer.
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    • Profile picture of the author JDSalinger
      Originally Posted by NateSimms View Post

      You could always set up an Amazon S3 account with their CDN (cloud delivery network).

      You pay $0.125 per GB up to your first TB.

      So, say you run upwards of 99 GBs of video a month ... you will only pay $12 for all that system usage. That is something that your "run of the mill" hosting providers (ie., HostGator) simply cannot offer.
      That sounds pretty good. But exactly how does it work? Would you host the website with some standard hosting like a business account with hostgator and then store the videos on teh Amazon S3? I was reading Amazon's FAQs and it says they can also host the website there but then says most folks are hosting only videos, content, and pictures with the service? So what is the story there for the distinction?

      Also, is there some rule of thumb out there on what you can estimate the GB usage would be for a video membership site?
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      • Profile picture of the author Nate Simms
        Originally Posted by JDSalinger View Post

        That sounds pretty good. But exactly how does it work? Would you host the website with some standard hosting like a business account with hostgator and then store the videos on teh Amazon S3? I was reading Amazon's FAQs and it says they can also host the website there but then says most folks are hosting only videos, content, and pictures with the service? So what is the story there for the distinction?
        This is precisely what I do.

        I still have my site hosted with HostGator ... but all of my resource intensive video is hosted on my S3 account.

        Also, is there some rule of thumb out there on what you can estimate the GB usage would be for a video membership site?
        Sorry, no idea.
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        • Profile picture of the author JDSalinger
          Originally Posted by NateSimms View Post

          This is precisely what I do.

          I still have my site hosted with HostGator ... but all of my resource intensive video is hosted on my S3 account.
          Thanks. I was reading a little further and it sounds like Amazon S3 can only handle html websites right now and not things like wordpress blogs so it sounds like that is why a lot of folks don't host their full site on their S3 account. However, Amazon recommends their Amazon's Electric Computer Cloud (EC2) for this aspect. Do you have any familiarity with it as one of its perks they claim is that it works well with other Amazon services like S3? I am just curious what would be better to use a hosting account like hostgator or this other Amazon service (EC2) with the S3 for the videos.
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  • Profile picture of the author Robert Kren
    I use Amazon S3 on many of my wordpress sites. I use S3 Firefox Organizer (a free plugin) and Stream Video Player plugin for Wordpress (also free). Once you upload a video to S3 Fox you need to right click the file and choose "edit ACL" then put a check mark under the word "read". After that just copy the video URL and use it with the Stream plugin.
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    • Profile picture of the author JDSalinger
      Originally Posted by Robert Kren View Post

      I use Amazon S3 on many of my wordpress sites. I use S3 Firefox Organizer (a free plugin) and Stream Video Player plugin for Wordpress (also free). Once you upload a video to S3 Fox you need to right click the file and choose "edit ACL" then put a check mark under the word "read". After that just copy the video URL and use it with the Stream plugin.
      This must be a fairly recent change because the articles I read on Feb 2011 said it could not handle Wordpress blogs. Regardless, that is good news. However, it still sounds like a regular hosting account will offer customers more options in terms of regular use. Obviously, an S3 account's biggest value is for holding videos and data at a value price.
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  • Profile picture of the author MattWell
    The Amazon S3 idea seems best. My only other suggestions are hosting the videos elsewhere, such as Youtube or Vimeo (I think you can make them private) and embed them. Or you can zip the video files and upload them. Your members will need to download them, but it is an option if nothing else works.
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  • Profile picture of the author Simeon Tuitt
    Originally Posted by JDSalinger View Post

    I am looking to start up a video site that will have an increasing number of videos on it where each video has 2 to 3 hours of recorded video on each. My question is what things do I need to think about in terms of bandwidth issues. Would a regular business account from a hosting company like say Hostgator be sufficient as they claim to offer unlimited bandwidth or do i need to get some type of specialized hosting? What do others use who have similar businesses? What do the big video tutorial companies use?
    I know its been a while since the last reply to this thread but thought I would jump in because I have just moved most my sites to EC2 and host my videos there and on S3, yes S3 can be used for hosting static sites as well as videos, but EC2 is what you need for wordpress.

    Personally if you are not very techie it can be a mind boggle to figure it all out, its taken me about 4 weeks of learning how to use it from scratch to migrate my wordpress sites to it, but now it offers scale up or down based on usage for me. If you have lots of videos with long running lengths, hosting on most Amazon products tends to be cheaper than a lot of services out there for shared hosting.

    My own host actually disabled my site when I hosted videos there the moment traffic started hitting my site because a shared server will slow down everyones site the moment a site starts getting popular.

    Did you get your video hosting issue resolved?
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