Buying some webspace. . .need the nitty gritty

[Josh Bass]

I've been thinking it might be a good idea for me to get a real website onto which could upload my two short films, demo reel, and whatever else I want. I understand that some places offer a decent amount of storage and bandwidth for about $100 a year? Is that correct? I think I could a decent amount of stuff on there if I MPEG-4 compress everything.

I'd like some recommendations as to who to get the webspace from, and someone please explain bandwidth. . .what it is, what it does, how it works.

My main goal would be to have, say, one of my movies up there for anyone to view at any time, I guess by streaming? Or maybe I could have a download option too. Anyway, thanks.

[Michael Wisniewski]

Josh

- see this thread

- and this thread

- and this thread for related info

bandwidth - for websites it generally means the amount of data that can be transferred off the site per month, measured in megabytes or gigabytes/month, for example: if your movie is 1 MB and your bandwidth allocation is 10 MB/month then your movie can be viewed/downloaded approximately 10 times a month, after that, you have exceeded your bandwidth for the month and the site may not be viewable for the rest of the month, unless you pay more $$

bandwidth also refers to the amount of data that can be requested from a website at any one time, a site might be able to handle 10-100 users at one time, but if you advertise during the superbowl, then you might get hit with 10K-50K people at once and you will have exceeded your bandwidth for that given time

[Josh Bass]

Sounds like ipowerweb is the one most people like. Basically all I want from it is to be able to stream my movies off it, and put my reel up as well, and be able to tell people "yeah, go here and click so and so."

I'm still a little hazy on the bandwidth. Are you saying there are two different kinds of bandwidth? Or do both of those definitions in the above post apply to the same thing? It kind of makes me nervous only being able to view something a certain amount of times each month.

Also, do these guys format the site for you? Does it have some kind of template? I'm no web wizard, and have no wish to become one.

[Michael Wisniewski]

>>> Are you saying there are two different kinds of bandwidth?

both definitions imply the same thing {how much traffic can your site handle} the difference in the definitions is the time being measured:

how much traffic can your site handle at any single moment
how much traffic can your site handle during a one month period

>>> also, do these guys format the site for you?

no they just provide the space, you have to create the web pages yourself, or, pay someone to create the site for you

>>> does it have some kind of template?

most website providers have an online application that allows you to auto-create your website

most web page creation programs also have templates

[John Gaspain]

tagged

[Josh Bass]

Ok, this should be it for the questions. I checked out the ipowerweb site, and it looks pretty good. They offer with their package 30GB or bandwidth per month. Is this an adequate amount for what I'm doing?

Mainly I want to be able to upload video files (compressed in MPEG-1 or -4 format) and have people be able to view them as streaming video. I don't plan on doing any business or anything through the site, but that could change in the future, I suppose.

[Michael Wisniewski]

We'll have to trade notes later on to see if 30GB is adequate! I'm doing the same thing on Ipowerweb.

I'm pretty sure though that 30GB is adequate for most compressed video formats :-)

[Josh Bass]

Alright, apparently I'm not done. I contacted ipowerweb with the following question, but have not heard back from them, and I'm impatient so:

Will I be able to access my site from anywhere? What I mean is, right now I'm in HOuston, but I may be moving to NY soon. Will I still be able to tweak and upload to the site no matter where I am?

[Michael Wisniewski]

>>> Will I still be able to tweak and upload to the site no matter where I am?

Yes. You can FTP to the site from almost anywhere.

The only problem I've run into - was accessing the website control panel from my work. The control panel runs on a port that's restricted by my network at work, so I have to wait until I get home or am at an Internet Cafe to make changes.

[Josh Bass]

Oh, that's no problem. I just meant did I have to be here specifically to access, or could I do it from my personal computer anywhere. Thanks.

[Dan Euritt]

<<<-- Mainly I want to be able to upload video files (compressed in MPEG-1 or -4 format) and have people be able to view them as streaming video.-->>>

you absolutely do not want to put mpeg1 on your website, or even mpeg4 for that matter... mpeg1 especially is very inefficient, and a real bandwidth hog.

what you want is a web video format that 1)is small and efficient 2)can easily be played back by the vast majority of computers on the internet.

since mac operating systems only make up about 3% of the operating systems on the 'net, you don't want quicktime, because everyone will have to download the player before they can see the video clip... microsoft never puts the quicktime player in any of the windows operating systems.

mpeg1 can be easily played back by windows pc's without downloading a player, but it's waaay too inefficient... i don't think that pc's can play back open-source mpeg4 natively, and at any rate, it's not nearly as good as windows media 9.

realmedia has a decent codec, but the complaints about the player are many, so i quit using it.

you can download the wm9 encoder for free from microsoft, just be sure and gamma-correct any internet video that you make... tv's gamma is darker than pc monitor gamma, and mac gamma is also different... you tend to see a lot of quicktime video that looks like mud on pc's.

all of the above is based on my personal experience hosting web vid's; last month people downloaded over 70 gigabytes of video clips off of my sites... hope this helps!

[Josh Bass]

Ok, something to chew on. So you're recommending encoding as Windows Media player files? Is that what I'm reading? If not, what do you recommend for encoding if I want people to be able to watch video?

[Josh Bass]

Ok, so I did some extensive tests with WM9, and here are the settings that I found to give me the best quality to file size ratio. I rendered this in Vegas 4. So when in Vegas 4, you go to render as, choose WM9 as the format, and use these settings:

Under the project tab:

Video rendering quality set to "best"

Under the audio tab:

Mode set to "quality VBR"

Attributes set to " VBR quality 10, 44 Khz stereo VBR"

Under the Video tab:

Mode set to "Quality VBR"

Image size set to "320x240"

Frame rate set to "15"

seconds per keyframe set to "8"

quality set to "93" (if I go to the next increment up, 97, the file size doubles!)


File size came out to 7.53 megs, and it's a 3:43 long short movie that I rendered this way. The video quality's not the best it could be, but any better and it'll shoot up to 14-20 megs, I estimate. It looks pretty darn good for compressed video to be viewed online. . .especially in 320x240 mode (as opposed to full screen).

I'd like to know if anyone has any advice on how to improve anything, or if these settings will create problems. I don't have a chance to put them up on the site and view them, since I just bought the webspace a few hours ago and they haven't set everything up yet.

[Richard Maloney]

I've used phpwebhosting.com with high recommendations- unlimited bandwidth, emails, cgi, php!, shell, etc., for $10.

[Josh Bass]

Too bad. Bought from ipowerweb.

Seriously, though, I just want to know if the above settings for my WM9 files sound groovy to everyone, if any of the WM9 experts out there have any gripes with anything.