Looking for a good video host

[snbe82]

Hello everyone,

I have used cirtex hosting off and on for several years now for small sites. I am now taking on a large project for a class I'm TA'ing. It's an online class and we will we need to have anywhere from 50-100 videos hosted. The videos range in size from 20mb up to 1gb or more (HD). The class size could be as large as 500 or so students and they would only access the video once normally.

I foresee me needing a pretty large amount of bandwidth for this. I have always enjoyed cirtexhosting's great support and am attracted to your video streaming capabilities.

My questions are:
1) Do you think that VZ3 would be a good choice?
2) Would the sever and installed modules allow me to stream a video as large as 1-2gb?
3) Do the modules allow HD video to be streamed?
4) Would some one who only has experience with shared hosting, such as myself, be able to host a virtual server easily enough? (I know, this is a subjective question.. but I'm just wondering what do you guys think)

Thanks!!

[snbe82]

One more question:

Sorry, I'm a complete noob to video hosting, but..

5) Does having the ability to stream mean that users download a small file (.rm for example) and open it in their own media player to have it streamed off of the server?

I don't know if there's a difference in having that ability vs just having the video streamed off the web site itself.

Thanks again!

[HostV Nicholas]

Hi there,
Thank you for your interest in HostV.

1) Regarding Bandwidth. It's hard to guess -- it would depend on how often the videos are being uploaded and if the students watch every one, and how often. If you had 100 Videos each on average 200 MB and 500 students accessed them each month you'd be looking at 10GB Monthly bandwidth, that wouldn't be enough. The good thing is that if you start with a VZ-3 and realize you need more bandwidth we can add on more bandwidth if needed or consider an upgrade to dedicated. However, assuming that new videos are uploaded once a week I don't think you will have any problems.

2) The installed modules will perform everything you need to encode and deliver streaming video to your visitors. The video size should not be an issue on a VPS.

3) Yes we can install the required modules that would allow for HD Streaming.

4) You shouldn't have any problems with a Virtual Server, all of our VPS's are fully managed and include 24/7 technical support via the help desk. We'll install and configure the server for optimal performance.

5) Streaming using the video scripts that we have available would be in the browser. The modules included convert videos to a format optimal for streaming directly from the site. Real Audio/Media files can be hosted on your VPS and made available and they would require that the visitor have the right codec (real player or real alternative)

Let me know if you have any other questions