Forum Moderators: not2easy
I am hoping to make a website where people can download movies (ten of them, 30 minutes each, mpeg format). I have the movies all ready in mpeg format ready to go.
So, now I am looking for a suitable web host. Is there anything specialist that I need on my web host to play mpegs? Is there any special software on the server that I will need?
Of course playing videos off my web host will require a lot of bandwidth. But how do I know how much I will need? A rule of thumb I have read is that, generally for websites, as a worst case scenario, how much bandwidth you need is:
total size of your site (disk usage) multiplied by the number of members visiting it
This is worst case because not every member will download every image, look at every page etc.
Does this rule of thumb apply well to websites with video content? So, for the bandwidth needed by a particular movie on the site in a month - I look at its file size and multiply this by the number of people I think will look at it in that month. Then to get complete picture - I repeat this with all the movies and sum the figure.
With video content on websites - what dictates the download speed? Why are some servers very fast in this respect and others slow? Perhaps someone could point me to a resource where I could learn more on this.
APPENDIX - below is something I cut and pasted from a website. It is where I got the rule of thumb I mentioned earlier.
HHow much bandwidth do I need?
TTo determine how much bandwidth you will need, you must estim ate how big each page on your site is and how many people are going to view it. To do this, add up the size of every image on the page and the size of the page's HTML files, and multiply that by the amount of views for that page you expect per month. For example, if you had three 10k images on your page and a 2k HTML file, you would have 32k of data on that page. Multiply that by your expected page views (let's say in this case it is 100,000 per month), and you get 3.2 G of data to be transferred that month for that page. Now calculate this for each page, and you will know approximately how much bandwidth your site requires.
calculating bandwidth usage: You could, once you are up and running, multiply the total size of your site (disk usage) by the number of members visiting it, for a "worst case scenario." I say "worst case" because hopefully not every member will look at every pic and video.
So, my question is how do I work out how much data transfer capability I will need on my host. Is that rule of thumb I mentioned in my last post a good way to calculate?
Going back to bandwidth - being data transfer per unit time - how is this advertised by web hosts? I always see them advertise the data transfer amount per month. But I don;t know how to find out about their bandwidth capability. Bandwidth is important because I guess it would determine how fast my website loads. Can someone refer me to a guide which discusses deciphering how fast a web host will be from the specs that it advetises.
Also, does anyone know a good, free tool to check website speed - if given the URL of a particlaur website?
