How Much Would Hosting a Video Site Cost? I'm thinking of launching a video website [I'm not saying anything about the content or it's source] but point is I know it'd be more expensive than hosting a regular website. So guys, how much should I expect to pay for a year to evaluate if the venture will be profitable or not?
If it's SWF content, then why not host it on youtube or vimeo? This way, you can plaster ads all over the site, but also take advantage of the zero costs in server fees. You would just embed all the videos in the site. You would also then be able to promote both on these video hosting sites and your own. If you must host the content on your own, then I'd look into determining a) how much content that you'll provide and b) the number of visitors you're likely to get daily. From there, contact the popular web hosts and see what they will offer you. You want something that can easily scale, as you don't want to be stuck paying for costly servers that you don't even use.
Thanks for the response. I guess the best option, before contacting the web-hosts for pricing information would be to actually try out the venture on a free service like youtube. Depending on the feedback I get [the number of view, comments if any, etc] then based on those findings, I'll be able to see if paying for a costly server would be worth it.
Depends on the bandwidth. If it's just a smaller site with a few videos and not much monthly traffic, you could easily get away with a cheap, or perhaps even one of the free webhosters. There's also the advantage of being in control of your own revenue/advertisements, and charging how much you want for them. YouTube is a good option if you have something well-established that a lot of people watch, otherwise it's pretty hard to get started.
The biggest problem when starting off would be how much storage you have. Then as bandwidth increases you have to worry about keeping your site from crashing. I would say that it could cost from a few hundred to a few thousand to host a video site.
It will most likely take some time for you to turn your site into something popular, so I think you could start with a basic shared hosting account with unlimited bandwidth. It wouldn't cost you more than a few dollars a month. If on one day that's not enough, you can upgrade to a VPS.
It would not be cost effective at all to pay a basic web host to run a video site. Many of them start off with a limit of a few gigabytes per month of transfer, then there are fees if you go above that. You can easily top that out with just a few viewers. Plus people expect high quality video these days, so you can't expect to only offer low quality highly compressed streaming video. I believe Youtube does allow you to make some of your content accessible by paying only, I know Amazon does. Youtube does allow you to make your URL's private too, meaning they won't show up in any search results, and the only one who would know them would be you - and eventually everyone you share them with. However if you embed the Youtube video into your own web page, then disable some of the playback controls (such as to open the video on Youtube), then that would keep the URL away from people who aren't tech savvy enough to find it.
Another nice site that allows you to embed videos onto your websites is Animoto. You can join a yearly membership or use their 30 second free videos. I have made several with them and really like the results. In fact, one of my friends who designs websites was worried that YouTube would remove it due to the music sounding like a non-copyright song. But all of their songs are copyrighted for use! They just sound very modern and useable and so no one would ever think they were something you were able to produce for free. Even my publisher who does their own book trailers ended up using the video trailer I made through Animoto. I opted for that because it was free and the video trailers they were producing cost quite a bit. I think the Animoto one turned out better! Maybe if you could use a website where you could embed these types of videos it wouldn't cost as much.
If users will be uploading and distributing their own content on your hosted space, then this can be a large undertaking. If you just want to upload and have a place to store your videos there are many basic and commercial solutions and hosting services that will do the job. What type of video site is this if you don't mind divulging a few more details?
It probably depends on the content and how many people view that content. You would probably have to get a dedicated server which could cost a couple hundred bucks a month (low end).
