My new site will have the option to download Youtube videos and Upload FLV videos. I would like to see this site reach 10k users per day. What hosting costs and requirements should I be looking at? (p.s. Hostgator has a $6.95 deal with unlimited bandwidth and disk space - shouldn't this be sufficient?)
Hostgator won't allow you to use up unlimited bandwidth...you can give them a try and see how much they actually let you use before they throw their TOS towards you and suspend your site. For something like that you would need a decent VPS. 10k visitors a day is a good amount of visitors and with the proper ads on there you shouldn't have any trouble with a VPS.
Thanks. So it will cost me at least $30 a month to run a free video site? How do ppl recover their costs?
depends on the provider but if you can place ads, get sponsors, etc. the investment would be very much worth it because you won't have to worry about getting suspended because with a VPS you're likely to have full control of the server.
Thanks. Do you know if VPS has faster upload time with PHP scripts? I have a PHP host to server upload script that takes forever.
You can try www.esited.com as they offer some reasonably priced VPS package. I have a video site in Wordpress MU, http://piyesta.com/blog , that is hosted with them using their shared hosting package. Also, the videos on my site are hosted at their server without any noted performance implication. They also allow wordpress MU installation with wildcard subdomain function as other shared hosting will not allow you to do such. I find them faster than the popular shared webhosting providers. Note. I don't own esited and there's no affilliate link in this post whatsoever.
I found one more name for you from google ..http://infrenion.com this company looks promising in video site hosting. Found many good reviews about this company on google.
Thanks. I just found out that the video files I upload are FLV. FLV have very very slow transmitting speed. So its not PHP related.
FLV's are video files and PHP is website script/code. I assume you would be putting the videos in some sort of website and most likely it'll either be basic HTML or php with a database depending on the script. And as for uploading to a server, that depends on your home connection as well. Can't blame the server for that one.
The FLV videos are 5 megs are take 2-5 minutes to upload, compared to a 4 meg JPG which is 20 seconds. I use a PHP script to upload FLV videos are was thinking PHP was slowing the process down. But it now seems that FLVs are just slow to transmit. This will bog down my site if 100's of people of using it simultaneously. And they may balk at the slow upload speed. Will get a VPS and hope to see faster upload speeds.
what method are you using to upload the images? Try FTP, they should give you the same speed. And most hosts would limit how much memory a php script can use, it may be what's slowing it down but you'd have to look at the limit. With a VPS you'd be able to change the limit. But in either case, FTP is better than browser when uploading/downloading files from a server.
A dedicated server would be the best option as per your requirements. As you will have full root access to your server, you will be able to install the applications you need and all the resources of the server will be dedicated to your websites only which will make a difference in the performance of the website. You can consider a basic dedicated server to start with and then upgrade when your requirements increase in future. Some of the hosting providers offer good deals on dedicated servers with management for free. Better to look for such hosting providers