sundaridevi - 12:33 pm on Nov 6, 2010 (gmt 0)

I went through this same decision making process a year ago and decided to host videos offsite using amazon cloud services (it is very robust as it uses the same servers that amazon uses for its video on demand service) and to host downloads on my own server. So I upgraded to 400GB/month bandwidth to host the downloads.

Anyway, a year later, things have changed I host 120 videos offsite, but I still haven't started the downloads and I'm paying for the server(!). Luckily my only client sharing that server asked for an FTP server, so I was happy to give him some of my idle bandwidth and let him foot half the incremental cost :p

So I think the moral for me at least is, start out slowly because you're not sure where you will end up. You can put one video on YouTube and go from there. Or just get a host for $10 that has cheap abundant bandwidth and few other frills and put your videos on there until you know how things will turn out. By the way, I wouldn't recommend hosts who give you unlimited bandwidth, as that usually means low quality bandwidth.

One stream is one view to one web client (one viewer).