Hosting cost of adding podcasts & video to a website?

Hosting
1

Hello.

I currently own a small news articles website. On a good day, I’ll get about 250-300 unique hits.

I was thinking of adding a media section to the website containing streaming video content and podcasts but I’m unsure of the bandwidth costs associated with adding audio and video. My current hosting plan provides 500GB of bandwidth and 256MB of RAM.

Does anyone know of a site that can help explain what to expect in regards to additional cost or has anyone dealt with similar experiences with their website?

Thanks.

2

Multiply the expected number of downloads times the file size of the video/audio. That’s all there is to it.

Let’s say that your podcast is 10MB in size. If all 300 people visiting your site download it, that’s 3000MB or 3GB of bandwidth used.

If 300 people downloaded your podcast every single day (which is highly unlikely), you’d use 30 * 3GB = 90GB of bandwidth per month. Well within your limit.

You can do the same calculation for your videos. If you upload the videos to YouTube and embed them in your site, then you have no extra bandwidth cost at all as the video will be downloaded tom YouTube and not your hosting.

3

You can check it with FFMPEG provider company, one company I found you can check more details with is http://www.infrenion.com they do support all this.

4

You don’t need FFMpeg unless you are -converting- from one format to another dynamically on your server.

It has no relevancy for what the poster actually asked regarding -streaming- a video clip

5

256Mb RAM? Is this a VPS? I suspect that the RAM will be your major limitation as concurrent sessions will likely push you well over the RAM limit.

Regards,

DK

6

It is hard to estimate how much bandwidth would you need. It depends of the website visitors and what they do on your pages. But you shall have a start up budget of at least $50 per month. It is important what kind of storage solution you will use, an external storage account or on site storage.

7

I would be tempted to host the media files through a third party host that specializes in the hosting and distribution of podcasts. Since the podcasting explosion there’s been a number of hosts appear who offer (for a monthly fee) unlimited hosting for your media (as their servers are engineered to handle heavy media streaming et al). Perhaps it’s an option you might prefer in preference to hammering your own bandwidth levels. :slight_smile:

8

I agree. You, first of all, need to start getting this traffic and then start worrying about the new web hosting solution. I think if you add media center will not kill your server at all.

9

You shouldn’t have problems unless your provider doesn’t actually deliver what they are selling to you (i.e. you can’t really use 500GB of transfer per month).

My advice is to go for it and watch your usage and to always maintain an off-provider full backup of your account including files and databases just in case (even if your provider claims to do so for you already.)