Hosting your Content

If you have an existing web hosting service, it will most likely be adequate unless you become very successful - the sort of problem we'd all like to have! When evaluating your current, or choosing a new, hosting company and plan, there are three parameters that need attention:

For those not comfortable with hosting their own material, we recommend 10Flicks.com who offer encoding, hosting and metadata entry services for content owners. 10Flicks.com is an independent corporation from Open Television Network and Open Television Network disclaims responsibility for any action of 10Flicks.com.

Storage

How much storage space do you have available under the hosting plan? Media files can be quite large so consider how many files you will have available (now or in the future) and plan accordingly. For example, show sizes will vary from 30 MB to 500 MB per file. If you have to store 20 shows at 500 MB each, then you will need 10 GB of storage.

It's a very simple formula: size of file x number of files = storage requirement.

Transfers

This is the crucial factor to get right for your financial success. You want the maximum amount of data transfer per month, at the minimum cost. How much you need depends on the success of your shows.

For example, working on a 500MB file size (per show), if 10 people buy per month, you need to transfer 5GB; if 100 people buy your show, you'll transfer 50GB; if 1000 people buy your show in a month, you'll transfer 500GB, and so on.

Plans that include data transfer of more than 1 TB (1000GB, or 1,000,000 MB) are usually fairly inexpensive. The shared hosting service at Dreamhost costs about US$11 a month and offers:

This is a good deal. Obviously Dreamhost do not expect every customer to use all their bandwidth, but the offer is there.

1and1.com also offer attractive hosting. For US$5 a month they offer:

If you are highly successful and need to turn to a Content Delivery Network (CDN) like Limelight Networks or Akami, you can expect to be offered an initial deal at around 80c/GB, dropping to "best" deals for those with huge data transfer requirements, of 30-40c/GB for when you get to YouTube-like data transfers. CDNs have virtually no delivery limit and are very important for high bandwidth delivery.

As you can tell, there is a gap between the price paid for bandwidth as part of a hosting deal and large-scale CDN distribution. Dedicated servers have transfer allowances of between 750GB and 3TB a month, for between US$70 and $340 a month. Some will allow unlimited transfers for a monthly fee.

Media Temple, among others, have Dedicated Virtual servers that provide 20-60GB of storage (40-120 500MB shows) and 1-2TB a month of transfer "from" US$50 a month (20GB storage and 1TB transfer). 1TB of transfer covers 2000 show downloads for 5c/GB or 2.5c/Program. With 60GB of storage and 2TB transfers a month the cost is US$150 month or room to store 120 shows and deliver 4000 show downloads for 7.5c/GB or 3.75c/Program.

Another solution, that requires programming expertise, is to use Amazon's S3 service, where storage is charged at $0.15/GB per month, and data served out is at $0.18/GB for the first 10TB a month. So to store our 20 500MB shows would cost 20 x 500 x 0.15 = $15.00 and to serve up 5500 shows to customers would be $459 per month, or 9c/show sale. Amazon's information site has the details and code samples.

Pipe

The final parameter that you need to take into account with your web hosting of show files is the size of the "pipe" - the speed of the Internet connection to your server. If we were to use a water analogy: the Internet connection is the equivalent of the pipe and the Data Transfer is the amount of water per month that could get through the pipe. For example, if the connection was 1Mb/sec, it means that only 1Mbit/sec (125KBytes/sec) can be transferred to the Internet at a time.

A 1Mbit/sec connection can deliver a total of 324GB over a month. With a 1Mbit/sec connection to the Internet "unlimited" bandwidth multi-Terabyte Transfers are pretty pointless, as the maximum over the month is 324GB.

Even if you wanted to deliver less bandwidth over the month, the slow connection would make downloads slow for all users. Fortunately this is not streaming so the worst-case-scenario is that downloads are just very slow.

These days the standard connection seems to be 100Mbit/sec to the (usually shared) rack or server. 100Mbit/sec is enough for all but the most successful content owners (who would be considering CDN or Amazon S3 solutions anyway).

You will probably have to specifically ask the service provider what their connection speed is.