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Web Hosting for Multimedia Sites

The things that attract people to websites the most are music, videos, and other multimedia content. These elements make a web site flashy, interesting to look at, and gives it a uniqueness that cannot be matched without these features. However, quality web hosting with these features are hard to find and entails much more than most people think and going with just any run-of-the-mill web host will not do. In this article we will look at the main factors that go into running a multimedia site and the options you have for running a multimedia site.

When hosting a multimedia site, the main factors that must come into consideration are space,bandwidth,CPU/RAM usage, and technical support. For most other kind of sites CPU/RAM usage would greatly outweigh space and bandwidth in importance but this is not so for a multimedia site. In a multimedia site, these things should have about equal importance when considering a hosting plan.

Space is a fairly high priority as many multimedia sites have archives of videos and music for users to sift through. If you plan to have an archive of thousands of video clips and music tracks or videos, then you will need to estimate how big your library will be initially and leave at least 30% extra disk space for expansion purposes. Since there are many web hosts that offer over 100GB of storage space, space is less of a concern than bandwidth but is still a large concern.

Since multimedia sites often have streaming videos or streaming music as a large part of their content, these sites generally take up hundreds of times of the bandwidth that most other sites take. Consider it this way: a regular site is made up of HTML,PHP, and image files. The average page probably has a size of 20-30k. A multimedia site with a streaming video or streaming music can easily be over 1mb in average file size. By this measure, a visitor to a multimedia site will use roughly 30 times the bandwidth as a user to a non-multimedia site. Since this is the case, bandwidth comes as a much higher priority for a multimedia site. If we do a simple calculation of about how much bandwidth you’ll need for a multimedia site with about 1000 visitors per day that each average about 3 page views per visitor, we get the following numbers: 1000 visitors * 3 pageviews/Visitor * 1mb per page * 30 days/month = 90GB of bandwidth. This may not seem like a lot, but most multimedia files are far larger than 1MB, and many times, there are several of these files per page. If it is a sticky site, an average user will also average far more than 3 pages per visit. If you want to offer other webmasters the ability to video-embed your files, your bandwidth usage will also be far higher than this. It is not unlikely that a decently popular multimedia site will push 1 terabyte(1000 Gigabytes) of bandwidth in a month. The quality of bandwidth for a site with streaming music or videos is also important as cheap bandwidth often has lag or latency which will annoy visitors and take visitors away from your website. If your multimedia site gets big, expect to pay a fairly large bill for premium bandwidth usage.

Along with space/bandwidth, CPU and RAM usage should be of equal concern if you are on a shared hosting account. Depending on which company you are with and how many people are jammed on the server with you, this may be more of a problem than even the colossal amount of bandwidth that is needed for a multimedia site. Many people neglect to look at this factor or are unaware of it before they choose a hosting company. They think that as long as they don’t go over the space and bandwidth limit, they are not going to have trouble with the host. The truth is that many more people get suspended for CPU/RAM over-usage than for space and bandwidth over-usages. A server only has so much processing power and RAM power to go around. When you have hundreds or even thousands of accounts on a server, each account only gets a very small portion of the total. Most hosts have controls in place and will suspend your account if you consistently use over a % of the total. This % could be as little as 1% to as great as 10% depending on the host, although I’ve seen a lot of hosts that use 3% as a point of suspension. When choosing a host, read the TOS agreement carefully and be sure of the CPU/RAM limits allowed on that host.

The last thing that is of importance for a multimedia site is technical support. When your site goes down or when you have trouble with the features of the hosting plan, you will need fast and reliable technical support to resolve those problems. Inadequate technical support can result in hours or even days of lost revenue and visitors. You want to ask your in web hosting forums such as webhostingtalk.com or freewebspace.net for opinions on how good the technical support of a web host is. Besides posting around in such forums, you’ll also want to talk to their sales team and their technical support staff before going with a particular web hosting company. Make sure that simple and basic technical questions such as server setup and configuration, usage policies, and allowed scripts can be answered quickly and efficiently. If they cannot answer these questions, they most likely will not be able to help you when you have a real issue that needs to be resolved.

Now that we have looked at the requirements of multimedia hosting, lets look at the hosting options.

1. Free hosting – This is not an option for multimedia hosting. Free hosting often does not allow the file types such as mp3 or flv that multimedia sites must have. Free hosts are also quick to suspend accounts without question for using “too much bandwidth” or “too much CPU”. I have not ever seen a free host myself that offers more than 2GB space and 20GB bandwidth along with reliable service and technical support for any extended amount of time. Even those who are post or ad-supported cannot do this and offer the features that are needed for a multimedia site. Two good free services are stonerocket.net and zoomcities.com, but their offers are too small for the needs of a real multimedia site. If you are looking to run a real multimedia site, you should look past free hosting and seek out paid options.
2. Shared Hosting – This may be a good starting point for a multimedia site. With shared hosting you can go one of two directions with multimedia sites. You can try your luck with a major overseller such as Hostgator or go with a more expensive but higher quality host. Hostgator offers lots of space and bandwidth at a cheap price. But his comes at the risk of account suspensions and at-best mediocre technical support. When you go with this option in shared hosting be aware that you are basically betting on the fact that your account will not go over the hosts CPU/RAM limits and be suspended. This may hold you over for a while, but overall, it is not a solid plan. The other option is to go with a more expensive but higher quality host such as downtownhost.com . These hosts have excellent technical support and will work with you on CPU/RAM limits but do not offer the massive amounts of space and bandwidth that a hostgator does. In this case, if your bandwidth is about to reach its limit, you will have to upgrade to a larger and more expensive plan. Despite the cost factor, I would still recommend this option over going with a company like Hostgator. A good compromise would be a company like media-temple which offers good technical support and space/bandwidth limits but comes at a much higher price.
3. Double shared hosting – This may sound like a funny plan but its actually one that works well for a lot of people. You basically buy an account from a place like hostgator or servage for their space and bandwidth and buy another small account from a place like downtownhost.com for their technical support and CPU limits. You host your actual site and pages from downtownhost but the video embeds and music feeds, you would host on hostgator or servage because of their large bandwidth allotment. This is a pretty good plan but before doing this, you need to make sure that the host you are storing the large files on allows you to use them as just a file storage place. There are certain hosts with TOS agreements that prohibit this kind of use. If you want the best of both worlds(CPU and bandwidth), you should give this option a look.
4. Clustered shared – The only company that does this on a large scale is Mosso and if you have a decently large multimedia site, I would encourage you to give this solution a look. Its still basically a shared environment, but the sites are run by a datagrid composed of hundreds of servers instead of a single server. CPU/RAM limits are going to be much higher on a solution like this than a regular shared solution and Mosso also offers 80GB storage space and 2TB of bandwidth transfer. The price on such a solution is $100/month, but that is a pretty good deal for a popular multimedia site looking for a managed solution and does not want to move to a completely dedicated server yet. The thing that keeps me from recommending this is the constant SQL container problems that Mosso and similar solutions have been having with this setup. If they get these problems fixed, this may be the best solution for a multimedia site.
5. Virtual Private Hosting(VPS) – In a VPS, your account is sliced off from other users. No one can borrow another’s resources and each account is guaranteed a certain amount of CPU and RAM. You will not get suspended for over-usage as you cannot effect the performance of other people’s sites. Likewise, another user will not slow your site down. This is a good solution for those who are tired of being on a crowded or slow server. However, if you are the one causing the slowdowns, a VPS may not be the solution for you. If you go over the resource limits of your VPS, your site will be consistently slow and many users will not be able to access your site. However, if this happens, you can always upgrade the resources of your VPS to allow for more visitors and your host will be much more inclined to truly work with a VPS client to resolve their problems than work with a shared client to solve the same problem. A VPS is a good stepping stone between a shared solution and a dedicated server.
6. Dedicated Server – For truly popular multimedia sites, a dedicated server is eventually where you will want to head. Most likely you will want at least a mid-grade managed dedicated server which will run you at least a good $200/month. However, if you have reached this point with a multimedia site, you should easily be making more than that off the site. Having a server to yourself provides many benefits like not having to worry about other users, being able to partition drives into primary and backup parts, and many other privileges that are simply not available on other solutions. Dedicated server customers also get the most attention from technical support when they have issues and many even have an emergency number you can call 24/7. When picking a dedicated host, go to webhostingtalk.com’s dedicated forum to inquire about the service levels of different providers as that will give you the best idea of which one to go with for best results.

Although finding hosting for multimedia sites is a challenge, with the correct amount of effort and vigilance, you can find a good solution for yourself. It may seem like a lot of work at first but you will need to do so in order to start and run a successful multimedia site.

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