I currently have a video site, but was thinking about adding on a feature that will let visitors embed the code and put it on their sites. This is obviously becoming a standard for online video business. Is this going to kill my bandwidth, though? My gut instinct is "yes," but I heard from someone that only Apache queries affects bandwidth, and this would not. Which is right?
Your instinct is right. As long as you host the videos, they will eat your server bandwidth by any means of displaying them to the public.
Are the videos hosted on your server? If so then yes it will absolutely hammer your bandwidth. To avoid this you can use Content Delivery Networks so the bandwidth will be theirs not yours, and the file will be delivered in a better way. However since CDNs arent free you will still be paying for bandwidth people consuming your video whether from your site or embeded. Jen
Unmetered bandwidth very rarely is, is one of the facts of webmaster life. If you look at their TOS, there is normally some clause that will them terminate websites that over use resources or limit you to the type of files transferred. Someone somewhere has to pay for the bandwidth. Jen
Yes I agree with you JenniP, though the hosting providers talk about unmetered bandwidth. its not real.
For shared accounts this is true, however, for dedicated servers unmetered is usually just what it says; how it works? They take a rack, put 25 quad core servers in it, add a 100 mbit line to the rack and you get 10 mbit or 100 mbit unmetered. Problem is; if one of th 25 servers burns 100 mbit all the time, you get 0 mbit. Luckily, almost no-one can steadily burn that kind of bandwith (personally I don't see the problem doing that, but I run a few of those racks and I know that even fairly popular sites don't burn even 10-20 mbit, let alone 100). In short, if you take unmetered bandwidth, ask how many users you'll be sharing with. They won't use a TOS against you as they are making profit
Yes of course it will use more bandwidth. You know what your doing right? The worst part is you can't really monetize it. Unless you can figure out some way to put Advertisements into the flash player which is not too easy. You need a Adobe flash wizard to make something like that.
Before going ahead and buying a video sharing script or website, think of a VPS or even a dedicated server that you'll desperately be in need of as soon as your website takes off. Shared hosting will not serve you for this purpose, so yes, the video sharing business can be costly at some point.
Yes this is the current trend in streaming video website. If you can't provide such feature then you can't be competitively compete in the industry. As always,you can use unmetered 100MBPS server to overcome the bandwidth issue. So that you are worried free about insufficient bandwidth
Mark Cuban (Owner of the Dalls Mavericks) discusses this on his blog www.blogmaverick.com I'm not sure which post(s), but he explains all about youtube losing money for goole and how to dix it and all about this...
Yes I'm 99% sure too that youtube is losing money. I dont know why Google bought that site, but Any other people owning that would had to shut the site down by now or put alot of Ads on it.
I've done some tests with video streaming from S3, and they werent good, although with Amazon is planning a CDN (Content Delivery Network) using S3 as a backend but tuned for performance. Trouble is your still paying for every play anyone who embeds your video makes. Also do you really need to allow embed? It does depend on who your targeting, people who want a cheap CDN like YouTube yes they want embed as they want to play the video at no cost to them, however if your targetting say businesses who just want a video to play on their website, perhaps dont need (or want) embed. Jen
Thanks for all of these replies, I've definitely learned a lot thanks to everyone here. I had a feeling this would be a bandwidth killer. I'm looking at once again getting a dedicated server (I had one last year but the cost really hurt). The one I'm looking at is a P4 2.8 ghz, 3 gb ram, 1500 GB transfer. Jenni: you're right - I technically don't need the feature. However, if I had it - I'd not only have one huge advantage over my competitor, but it would be great for site promotion, since all of my videos are exclusive to my site (ripped them myself) and are watermarked directly onto the FLV's. My site currently has about 48.5 gig transfer/mo. It only gets about 300 uniques per day, but I'm at a page 3 ranking for a major one word keyword, and I'm putting a lot of time and effort into hitting page one. When that happens, the bandwidth and uniques will skyrocket.
Read my blog for Cloudfront/S3 test; I need to write a new post as currenlty we have been running more than a month and it runs fine and is cheap. Very fast and optimally served.