What hosting package would work

[Trzl]

Hello,

I plan on using your hosting for a few sites. I mainly am picking glowhost for the ffmpeg package.

I'm just wondering what package would be the best fit.

I plan on doing a lot of 1gig mov to flv conversions. But only for client use. I just dont want to run into a situation where I run out of resources.

Or can I seemlessly and automatically upgrade if needed? Also do you give warnings when limits are about to be reached?

Thanks!

[Alexander]

Hello,
video streaming uses a lot of server's resources, so dedicated server is the best solution if you are going to host a lot of large videos. Sure, you can try to start with the shared hosting plans, all our packages support ffmpeg, but as far as I can judge from my experience, such large videos require at least powerfull VPS.
You can upgrade any time you wish without any problem. If someone overuses server's resources, we send him a notification regarding this issue with the suggestions how to resolve it.

[Matt]

You would require a VPS or dedicated server because system-wide configuration changes would need to be made in order for your server to allow such large file uploads especially for your users on dial up. Anything over 100 megs or so will not work well on a shared server due to firewall settings and other timeouts in systems like PHP and MySQL.

[Dmitriy]

I can't tell anything else, but advice you to use VPS or, better, dedicated. If PHP & MySQL issues could be solved, server resources & load problem will still remain. You could easily work with small movies in shared environment, but HD movies or DVDs (whatever bigger than 100-200 MBs) will require fine tuning of scripts\applications & lots of server resources, that, better, will be dedicated only to processing your scripts.

[Matt]

FFmpeg is fairly load friendly but again not for the large things and the biggest problem with shared servers is the upload will timeout before the file transfer is completed and the security settings on the shared servers are not able to be customized to the needs of a particular 'nix user or script.

[Dmitriy]

Well, yes, if the HTTP upload is used.

[Trzl]

I do not plan on getting a lot of traffic for this. The large uploads will be for CLIENTS only. The url wont be advertised. Maybe once or twice a month a client will upload a 3-5 min. 720x480 mov file. I will then encode to flv and make available for client to Download the new file. I have seen those types of files exceed the 1 gig mark often.

Our old way of doing this would be through ftp. Which caused for the client to upload the video, then I would download the video, then encode to flv, then re-upload the converted file, then tell the client to download, and finally, the client would then download their video. I am trying to simplify this process w/ ffmpeg.

I would like instead, to upload video, then server converts the file, then puts new file in a specific folder. Done.

Again, I do not expect high traffic volumes at all. But, definitely high file sizes. (1-2gigs per file).

I hope this helps clarify. Im looking forward to getting the ball rolling with this. If this can work for both of us.

Thanks!

[Matt]

Well that sounds like you want to use HTTP upload which will time out on a shared server. If you can do FTP I am sure you can set a cron job to look in the dir where the mov files are located and ffmpeg will handle the rest. But if you are trying to have your clients upload gigs of data via HTTP upload its not going to work if the upload takes more than 1800 seconds to complete.

[Trzl]

Well that sounds like you want to use HTTP upload which will time out on a shared server. If you can do FTP I am sure you can set a cron job to look in the dir where the mov files are located and ffmpeg will handle the rest. But if you are trying to have your clients upload gigs of data via HTTP upload its not going to work if the upload takes more than 1800 seconds to complete.

Thanks, thats is good to know. Well, I guess ftp upload is the way to go then. But now I have a few more questions.

Could a php script upload files via ftp? Maybe if a seperate ftp account was created for the script?

Then cron job sounds like a good idea, but could that cron job be fired manually? Or better yet - Having the cron job linked to a submit button, Is that possible?

Thank you guys, you really know your stuff. I appreciate your help.

[Matt]

Well even FTP may time out if it is initiated via script and the script holds the connection open. SSH would probably be better for that.

You could write a php script and call it from a browser to fire it manually instead of via cron, or both.