Web Hosting

Video Sharing Web Sites seem all the rage right now, and a quick check on Alexa reveals that traffic to the established sites is soaring. So how to get in on the action and set up your own video sharing site.

1. Choose a niche for your video site. This will help in gaining some leverage initially in the search engines, and differentiate it from the very popular and well established sites such as YouTube and Google Video. A niche might comic or funny video’s, internet marketing, howto’s and tutorials or a particularly type of cooking.

2. Choose a good domain name, the shorter and snappier the better. This goes hand in hand with choosing your niche. If you are creating a niche video sharing website, such as racing cars or say football, consider incorporating your keywords into the domain.

3. Obviously you will need a web host for your video site. The cheapest option would be to go for shared hosting. So you may need a more specialist video provider. Once your site gets established you will need more resources, perhaps a dedicated server. A virtual private server is a good compromise.

4. Normal web hosting might need the requirements for video sharing so check out web hosts, and Google for “ffmpeg hosting.” FFMpeg is a utility that powers a lot of video sharing sites as it will encode video in varying formats to flash video player format (.flv)

5. You visitors will want to upload their video’s. These will be in different formats. If you have used YouTube you will know that they encode your uploaded video’s into a flash format (.flv files). This requires specialist modules to be installed in your hosting account or dedicated server. These are ffmeg, ffmpeg-php, libogg

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