Hello, I am about to start a video streaming site using phpmotion. I have never had/ran a video sharing site before so i am not fimiliar with it. I never had to worry about space or bandwidth before. I will be hosting 2gig+ video files that id like viewers to be able to watch. Now does this mean if someone watches the whole movie, it eats up 2gig out of my bandwidth? Also, are all bandwith"es" created equal sort of speak? What i mean is, what should i look for in a hosting service to have something with the best speed possible? or does that not really matter and they are all the same (ie just depends on the usage?) Thanks
From my understanding, the video will have to buffer, so depending on how long it is and how large the file is, that will eat up your b/w.
Bandwidth and speed are really a problem for video hostings, you pay much more for bandwidth and speed than running the site . Try to latest technology like cache tech, distributor server tech and p2p tech . Good luck to you .
If you have a 2gig video and someone watches the whole thing then yes it would use 2gigs of bandwidth if the video was stored on the server. It is important to ask a host if they allow video streaming before you host with them since some will terminate or suspend your hosting if they do not allow it. Another option would be to use a program to lower the quality of the video so that it is not as big or upload the videos to youtube or something similar and stream them on your site from there. Youtube allows you to embed their videos onto your site. Please also note that hosts with unlimited or huge amounts of bandwidths might not really allow as much bandwidth as they say they do, this is usually just a marketing tool to attract customers. I hope that helps
also, if you are going to allow others to upload videos ( that is what phpmotion is for ) then as they upload the video, it is using your bandwidth as well. also, using your space. the same thing is true about unlimited space , there is no such thing. many of the hosts that tell you that only allow so many "nodes" or files on the server etc. just be sure of what you have and what they allow. robert
thanks everyone....my question of speed still remains. How do I know if a hosting company connection speed is good? what do i look for or are they all pretty much the same
well you would probably want to ask what connection speed their servers or hosting accounts have, like 100mb/s or 10mb/s and how much of it you can use or how many people you share it with. Like 100 people could have shared accounts on a server where each person would be expected to use 1mb/s each. However if the hosting company does not have limits for each account then someone else could use 40mb/s and thus slowing everyone down. I hope that explains it a little.