This is my first post so hello to all

 

I have a client who runs an events company, who host profit free nights at many different locations around the UK. The company have a strong following of approximately 500 on their Face book pages with a further 1000 + invitations being sent out for each gig. The company is ran on the side along with the owner's full time job's therefore funding and budgets have their limits.

 

I am currently designing a website using flash/actionscript/java/xhtml ect.... for the company which will contain

 

 

Pages

 

• Home page
  
• About page
  
• Events page
  
• Resident Dj page
  
• Artists Page
  
• Photo page
  
• Music Page
  
• Video Page
  
• Contact page
  

 

And eventually

• e-commerce page's for purchasing merchandise (cd's ect)
  

although not required at present

 

The tool's that will be implemented into the website:

• Mp3 player
  
• Mp3 downloads
  
• Video player
  
• Flash Gallery
  
• Radio
  

 

The 'radio' will be used for live streaming using Prate Radio software by Destiny Media Technologies.

 

The streaming will be at maximum 6 hours a day for an average of 2/3 days a week and will be used for sessions (sets) and occasionally streaming live gigs.

 

 

I was wondering what sort of hosting package We are looking at for the website to run efficiently

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated

 

Dwp

Welcome to WDF!

 

One factor will be how many videos and mp3 files you want to server from the site. Video files are large and take up a lot of disk space, mp3's and 5mb a time soon start eating into the space if you plan to have loads.

 

For the radio you may well need the appropriate server side facilities to enable streaming - the biggie here is the amount of concurrent users will be listening in at one time.

 

I'm not an expert in streaming technologies but someone knowledgebale should be along shortly.

 

From what you're trying to do a VPS might be viable, otherwise it's going to be a Dedicated server.

Hi There,

 

If your streaming live gigs, media, videos etc you are going to want ideally a dedicated server if you are to do it properly. You will also need a lot of transfer and a sizeable amount of RAM - streaming media eats bandwidth and resources.

 

We have a few clients who run radio stations etc and stream media and they use around 2TB bandwidth a month on a 100Mbps port.

 

Personally I would go in with a dedicated server - like I said, its the only way to do it properly...

 

Do you have a budget as we would be able to help (We already provide media hosting solutions to a few clients as I stated earlier ).

The 'radio' will be used for live streaming using Prate Radio software by Destiny Media Technologies.

 

The streaming will be at maximum 6 hours a day for an average of 2/3 days a week and will be used for sessions (sets) and occasionally streaming live gigs.

 

Most of your requirements can be met by most hosts. However, regarding the product above, I just had a quick look at their website and gathered that it streams directly to your listeners via your home computer rather than in conjunction with a web server? Is this correct? If so, unless you have an extremely high upstream speeds, then I would suggest looking at a product such as Shoutcast.

Hi There,

 

If your streaming live gigs, media, videos etc you are going to want ideally a dedicated server if you are to do it properly. You will also need a lot of transfer and a sizeable amount of RAM - streaming media eats bandwidth and resources.

 

We have a few clients who run radio stations etc and stream media and they use around 2TB bandwidth a month on a 100Mbps port.

 

Personally I would go in with a dedicated server - like I said, its the only way to do it properly...

 

Do you have a budget as we would be able to help (We already provide media hosting solutions to a few clients as I stated earlier ).

 

 

Hi again Rob, I was just about to send you the link to this page, but my dinner called, lol.

 

To be honest a dedicated server is out of the question due to the cost, I am unable to get a budget from the customer, could you give me a price range that I can then present to him. Do you think your vps plans would do as a starter? as i'm guessing your very flexible with upgrading in the future?

maybe your VZE Developer?

 

Thanks for all your help today and fast replies very impressed

 

Dylan

Most of your requirements can be met by most hosts. However, regarding the product above, I just had a quick look at their website and gathered that it streams directly to your listeners via your home computer rather than in conjunction with a web server? Is this correct? If so, unless you have an extremely high upstream speeds, then I would suggest looking at a product such as Shoutcast.

 

Yes it does, what sort of upload speed do you think would be appropriate for the job..?

 

Thanks for the help and suggestions I will look into it now

It really depends on the quality of the stream and the number of users at any one time. If you stream at around 96kbps and expect to have ten listeners then you would need a 1MBit upstream speed and so on.

If you went for the VZE Developer package, depending on the amount of visitors you had would determine how quickly you used bandwidth - if your constantly streaming live video and mp3 files etc to lots of users then its going to eat the bandwidth like there is no tomorrow.

 

But regarding the pirate radio etc... Like TJR said, you are going to want a strong uplink to the web from your home PC - Ideally SDSL.