I am writing an eBook that will be available in PDF format and I would quite like to include links inside for users to watch small video tutorials online in different formats, such as iPhone and iPad etc. I did consider including the videos within the the PDF, however there seems to be a viewing bug in the Mac version of Acrobat and in any case the combined download size would likely become absurd.
The option exists to serve those videos directly from my server but I’m concerned that a big rush of downloads at the same time might slow down the site and quickly exceed my bandwidth allowance, so I was thinking about upgrading to a DropBox paid account with a 100gigs of space and making the video links available through the public box that is linked to from the document. This would allow me 250 gigs per day of bandwidth without slowing down the main server.
I have no real experience at all with sharing videos online but I don’t want to use YouTube with ads all over the place and I was looking for an elegant solution if possible without spending a fortune. Possibly even creating web pages using Freeway and having the videos fed from other sources. Does anybody have any suggestions on the best way to do this?
You might want to use Amazon S3 instead to host your videos. That’s what I use for FreewayCast. There’s tons of data there, accessed all the time, and my monthly bill has yet to break $1. (Usually around $0.40)
If you have Transmit, you can upload to S3 just as if it was a regular SFTP server, set the permissions to allow anyone to read, etc. URLs are simple: http://your-bucket-name.s3.amazonaws.com/filename and there’s a CDN feature called Cloudfront that moves copies of the files all around the globe, the better to be physically near your customers. (CDN means Content Delivery Network.)
Walter
On Oct 26, 2012, at 10:05 AM, Ashley wrote:
I am writing an eBook that will be available in PDF format and I would quite like to include links inside for users to watch small video tutorials online in different formats, such as iPhone and iPad etc. I did consider including the videos within the the PDF, however there seems to be a viewing bug in the Mac version of Acrobat and in any case the combined download size would likely become absurd.
The option exists to serve those videos directly from my server but I’m concerned that a big rush of downloads at the same time might slow down the site and quickly exceed my bandwidth allowance, so I was thinking about upgrading to a DropBox paid account with a 100gigs of space and making the video links available through the public box that is linked to from the document. This would allow me 250 gigs per day of bandwidth without slowing down the main server.
I have no real experience at all with sharing videos online but I don’t want to use YouTube with ads all over the place and I was looking for an elegant solution if possible without spending a fortune. Possibly even creating web pages using Freeway and having the videos fed from other sources. Does anybody have any suggestions on the best way to do this?
Hi Walter,
Amazon S3 would have been my automatic choice and I know they are really cheap for storage but I’ve seen various comparison charts where they worked out very expensive for bandwidth if you start to consume large amounts. Looking online now it currently costs about 9p per gigabyte of transfer and that could really add up.
I currently have a bandwidth allowance of 4TB, which is massive for my current requirements but the new book will be heavily marketed, so it’s hard to tell right now how this might impact on bandwidth or server load going forward.
You might want to look at Dreamhost, who famously don’t have any caps on storage or bandwidth. But seriously, I would only worry about this if it starts to become a problem. It’s fine to think ahead about it, but if you have control over the DNS for your content server (and even S3/Cloudfront can be “fronted” from your domain) then it just doesn’t matter. If files.yourdomain.com is your “asset host”, then it doesn’t matter where the physical back-end of that hostname really lives. You can put that in as the host of your remote assets (burn it into the books, in other words) and when you start seeing way too much traffic for your current host, you can move the end-point to another more liberal host, without any change needed in the books, and without your customers ever knowing any different.
Walter
On Oct 26, 2012, at 11:00 AM, Ashley wrote:
Hi Walter,
Amazon S3 would have been my automatic choice and I know they are really cheap for storage but I’ve seen various comparison charts where they worked out very expensive for bandwidth if you start to consume large amounts. Looking online now it currently costs about 9p per gigabyte of transfer and that could really add up.
I currently have a bandwidth allowance of 4TB, which is massive for my current requirements but the new book will be heavily marketed, so it’s hard to tell right now how this might impact on bandwidth or server load going forward.
Sure I was already planning on using a redirect via .htaccess on the server from the book links, so I can change the location of the actual video files at will. I’ve always been dubious though about the reality of unlimited bandwidth with cheap shared hosting plans for this kind of usage.
About 7 years ago I actually used Dreamhost with a shared hosting plan and they were OK at the time for my modest requirements apart from the email that was hopeless. I’ve only just moved from a 1 gig VPS on Hetzner to a 3 gig VPS with Futurehosting.