I need some advice...

[SHALE]

Hello everyone! I am new here and wonder if I could get some advice on webhosting (I am sure I am in the right place)

I just bought a domain name (sevenpoundnine.com) in honor of my newborn daughter (born 01may2001 4:11pm :D) I want to set up a site to post images of her, possibly some video clips, and to set up a message board/guest book so that relatives may keep up to date.

I really am getting confused what to look for in a hosting site. Is there some place that gives a good run down on what to look for? How important is hard drive space? What exactly does bandwidth/month mean?

I really need to find some balance between cost, reliability, and features. I dont' have a lot of money and want to maximize what little I can spend, but I don't want to sacrifice service. Any ideas?

p.s. any links to good resources would be helpful as well. Thanks for helping out!

[Jaiem]

Hi Shale. Welcome to the forums.

It sounds like this will be a more personal site than anything business oriented. With that in mind you probably want a plan that has enough disk space to hold the pictures. Depending on the size and how many pics that can take up some space.

But since personal sites usually don't get a lot of traffic you probably don't need to pay for a lot of badnwidth.

How will you be doing the web development? You'll need either FTP access or MS FrontPage support. Most hosts come with both but just check anyway.

Good luck!

[akashik]

Shale,

In short, disk space is how much room you have in your account. Whether it be 10 megabytes or hundreds of them. This number gives you the total area of space your files are allowed to take up on a server's hard drive. That includes html files, graphics, ecripts etc.

Data transfer is how much information gets drawn from your site (grnerally per month). Everytime someone goes to your site and sees a page, downloads a movie etc, it's viewed on their computer. It gets there by being downloaded from the server your site resides on. Hence data transfer. It's also called bandwidth, but that's actually a misnomer. (but one that's becoming interchangable these days)

Diskspace is only important if you don't have enough of it :D If you know what you have, and know what you want to put on your site it's not hard to figure out if you need more (most control panels will tell you exactly what you have left anyway)

Video clips and message boards can be pretty heavy on the data transfer understandably, so I would imagine that would be your biggest consideration.

I'll private message you a link with a list of definitions if you like (it's on my site so would cross the line of advertsing I think to post it out here) :)

Hope that helps

Greg Moore

[SHALE]

Thanks for the replies.

Yeah, this is a personal site...and I don't expect more than about 20 people visiting it regularly (if even that). I am really concerned about the video clips and bandwidth. I could always get rid of that on my site but it would be nice to show people.

I have been reading some of the links that were sent to me (thanks everyone!) and have a quick question. If I had a video clip on my site that was 1MB and had 1GB of bandwidth/month, would I run out of space if that video was downloaded 100 times? And what should I look for if I want some sort of streaming solution (and does that cost very much?)

your inquisitive little newbie :rolleyes:
!shale

[akashik]

no a 1 meg video would need to be downloaded 1000 times to blow a gig :) Of course you'd have to take into account the rest of the site as well so it would probably be 800 times or so plus the site itself.

If a host has the ability (which most do) streaming video isn't much of a problem. It's all in the set up. http://www.real.com has a tutorial in there somewhere about it I believe.

Greg Moore

[SHALE]

well, I never claimed math was my strong point :)

So, would you recommend that I look for a host that has streaming video set up? Would that be the easiest/most economical way to post video clips?

[Jaiem]

Streaming is one option. The other is to put the videos and AVI's or some other format then having the visitors download the video and run it locally.

Streaming means sending a flow of data (in this case video) from your site to the visitor's PC. The PC buffers the data and plays it more or less in real-time. You have to be online and connected to the specific site ot get the stream (I'm listening to a radio audio stream right now as I type this).

When you download a video clip the visitor copies it to their PC and runs it locally. They can be on or off line.

BTW, many hosts charge extra for audio/video streaming because it consumes more resources.

[akashik]

Were it me (and yeah I've had some experience putting baby videos online *grin*), I'd probably use .mpg You won't stream with it, but it's 20 times smaller than .avi and is probably one of the clearest to sit and actually watch.

7'9 huh? Ours was 8'10 (almost 2 now). If you don't have one already I'd suggest a digital camera too. Not only does it make uploading photos easier but you'll save a ton on film - at last count we had close to 800 photos of her so far :)

Greg Moore

[SHALE]

Well, if it is going to cost very much more then I think that I will just make them download the files...not sure how many clips I would post anyway :)

yeah, she was born at 4:11pm (after 24 hours of labor *ouch*) and weighed 7lb 9oz. She is really cute! We have a digital camcorder that takes stills. They come out looking great at the size we would want to post them on the web...the pictures look really bad when you try to print them, but I guess that is what a regular camera is for ;)

[akashik]

In general it shouldn't cost you more (not to say some people won't charge you more of course). As I said, for me, it would be a question of clarity for the end result. Real Video is pretty s****py to look at - though it's slowly getting better. Mpg and avi are a lot clearer - they just can't stream. You could go for Quicktime I suppose but the files for that are pretty large.

So balancing quality and size, mpg is still the way to go in my opinion.. :)

Greg Moore

[JTY]

If you do choose to use mpg make sure the format is mpg4, as it's pretty small.

[SHALE]

Sounds like mpeg is the way to go....what tools should I use to compress the video? Is there a good, inexpensive program that I can use. I haven't looked on the cd that came with the camcorder (it is a sony), but I am sure that it came bundled with something...;)

[akashik]

Do you have a video capture device? Something that allows you to plug a video camera into the computer.. If so it'll be worth looking to see what's on the CD My Sony didn't come with anything like that sadly so I has to get one of my own.

http://www.dazzle.com/products/photo.html

is the one I use. It's about the cheapest one they have but still makes a good enough movie for the web.

All you do is plug everything together, run the program, press play on the camera, then record on the program, and keep recording till you're done. Hit stop and save and bingo... mpg :)

Greg Moore

[SHALE]

hmmmm, well I know that I have a cable that I attach to a serial port to transfer the still images....do you need something different for video?

[akashik]

You know something? I haven't a clue... I would imagine yes, you would need something else as serial ports are mightly slow (and video needs a pretty quick connection like USB or Firewire) My digital still camera uses a serial port and it takes forever.

Before you go racing out to the store though I'd hit the books and check the manual. It'll be pretty quick to find if what you currently have will allow for video capture to the computer (probably at least 10 pages of it) :D Electonic manufactuers don't tend to give you much past what the basics are - whens the last time you got a cable with a printer for example *lol*

Greg Moore

[Jaiem]

I'm not an expert on the video thing but I think if you just want simple stuff you can get a Quick Cam that plugs into the serial (maybe parallel, not sure) port. But if you want to use your camcorder and do some editing I think you need a video capture card in your PC and editing software. It's not cheap but shouldn't be alot either. The tech has come down greatly in price. I know a lot of pros who use thier PC to edit videos and they haven't spent tons either.

[akashik]

well that little Dazzle card I use was under $100 a few years ago now (so I presume it would be less now). You *can* spend thousands, but for the whole 'whack a baby video on the net' thing it's pretty affordable. Cams are ok (I have a Kodak DVC325), but as soon as you move things get funky till it cleans up. Running a live cam might be a good idea too I suppose. Use a freeware app like ChillCam (http://www.chillcam) which uploads a new picture whenever you set it for - 15 or 30 seconds usually. They have one in production right now that will stream video right from your desktop. Not sure if that will be free too.

There's another called Quickcam32 (I think) that already does the streaming thing for $40 or so I believe.

So... there are a lot of options for getting video online and onto a website. The ones mentioned in this thread cover most of the easy ways to do it, and still work within a small site (which you're looking at)

Greg Moore

[JTY]

A WinTV would work well for the job, and they're fairly cheap.