Hosting Your Video Files At Amazon
August 16, 2007 by Bruce Walls
Hosting videos on the server at your hosting account will soon use up your bandwidth allowance especially if your videos are frequently viewed. You will need to upgrade your account and this will increase your monthly costs.
Uploading your videos to a video sharing site and embedding them back into your page is not a good idea in this instance as it will take control and quality away resulting in a poorer video for your viewers.
How much bandwidth does a video use? It is real easy to determine. A 10MB video that is viewed from start to end will use 10MB of bandwidth. If the video is viewed by ten people then you will use up 100MB of bandwidth. If it is viewed by 100 people then you use up 1GB of bandwidth.
Bandwidth is cheap enough and you can upgrade but there is a service that will host your videos for you where you literally pay by the view. Amazon offers a service called S3 which allows anyone to tap into their network and use their storage. You can upload all your videos, and have them play from Amazon after your viewers click on the video displayed in your web page. Storing and playing your videos from an outside service like Amazon S3 will keep your site from slowing down.
The costs of the service are real cheap. You are charged 15 cents per GB of storage and 17 cents per GB of bandwidth used and you only pay for what you use. A 10MB video with 100 viewers per month equates to 1GB and will cost you just 32 cents.
You can have the cheapest hosting account at Hostgator and pay for bandwidth as you use it at Amazon S3. It doesn’t come cheaper than this.
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