Posted on 02/20/2015 7:08:50 PM PST by tang-soo
I value the technical advise found on FreeRepublic concerning technical matters, so looking for a bit of assistance.
I have a web site I've built and I'm ready to host it. Much of it will be links to videos that are all housed via Google Drive. I found out youtube no longer supports private (ie login required) links. These videos are mostly family recordings so we wish to provide them only for family members. Google Drive does allow restrictions via specific gmail login accounts. There will also be many other pages supporting Christian literature and links. I've written several articles I wish to put out there, and a book I hope to publish soon.
I started investigating hosting sites and all that I've checked have lowball incentives then jack the price up after the introductory period expires.
I'm looking for a service that's reasonably priced and allows me to retain the domain name if I choose to leave (for a reasonable fee). Also, since there will be significant traffic for the videos, will that pass through the host's server and count against any bandwidth allocation, or since the video files are on google drive will the traffic flow directly from google drive to the user?
Any advise or thoughts I may have left out will be greatly appreciated.
I do this with private family videos. I send the link to family members and they're able to view it but nobody else can.
I switched to GoDaddy last year and I’m quite happy with it. Good price and it’s easy to reach a human on the support line.
If ALL you’re wanting to do is share content with certain people, and not the world; I would recommend Dropbox.
In Dropbox, you can share entire directories or files from their servers, generating unique URLs for what you want others to access, and you can share them with people. Their free storage is very generous too. Lots of features as well.
M4L Web hosting
Can/do you get internet service from your cable company ?
I would advise for first choice hosting at your home on your own machine: be your own host.
You need only a static IP address.
Cable internet will be plenty fast enough for such sites.
You will then only be limited by the disk space on your machine - say 500G.
And you will know where your data is, can take a backup of it yourself, etc.
You will be in full control.
Static IP will only cost a few extra bucks per month.
You can private message me if you’d like more info.
Obtain your domain independent of your hosting service and then no problem with switching hosting services, as all you have to do is repoint your domain to your new hosting service from your domain registrar.
I’ve found godaddy.com to be an excellent domain registrar, with an excellent set of management tools. On the other hand, their email hosting absolutely sucks, and I’m not a fan of their web hosting either. Anyway, you usually get your email hosting and web hosting as an integrated service anyway.
I’ve used bluehost.com for several web sites (including my own), but they’re tiny sites with small amounts of bandwidth consumed, and while they give excellent support out of Utah, I understand their claims of unlimited everything are pretty much BS, and if you exceed even nominal usage, they cut your site off at the knees and tell you to go piss up a rope if you don’t like it.
Do some research and check out hostgator.com. BTW,dreamhost and bluehost are owned by the same company.
Whoever you you think about getting, I’d call ‘em first and tell ‘em what you expect your storage and bandwidth needs are going to be before you sign up and invest a lot of work in the web site.
Good info already. Thanks.
If you can get your hands on a Clearwire device (and have decent service in your area), and have the know-how (and a spare, decently powerful computer), you can set up your own private cloud.
Clearwire (through one of their many re-sellers) assigns your CPE node a relatively stable IP address. Forward only the ports that are necessary to avoid attacks.
As for CPE devices (if you choose to go this route), I recommend the Hub Burst. Simple, and provides most of the features you would need for such a purpose. Just change your D.N.S. to point to your node, and you should be all set.
Note: US SPRINT will turn down the WiMAX network in November. Perhaps there may be an equivalent LTE CPE device on offer by then. (US SPRINT, and some of their resellers, are doing a WiMAX trade-in for affected customers)
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I decided to set up my server this way, and dedicated a line just for it. (Freedompop offers 10GB for $21.99—way less than anywhere else, with a $7/GB overage on demand.)
Also, if you decide this is right for you, a SSD would be great for streaming video. Otherwise, keep the hard drive defragmented often.
http://www.bluehost.com has unlimited space and unlimited bandwidth. Reasonable price. I’ve been with them for six years. You could put all of your videos on that site and not worry about Google Drive or any of the other services.
You also may want to check with the DJs in the FReeper Canteen. They have many sites.
Bluehost has worked well for me. For the price, it’s a good value. You can pay extra for Weebly if you’re not that good at design.
For video, I use Brightcove. It’s not too cheap, but you get what you pay for.
For a paywall, tinypass integrates with Brightcove well and is inexpensive.
The problem I’ve had with other video streamers is quality; Brightcove quality is very good and it works on all user platforms.
You can integrate Brightcove and Tinypass on Bluehost.
I use ExpertHost and they host a couple of hundred page website for me
Google Sites will host your site for free. When the hosting company for my local amateur radio club suddenly decided to cease operations, I was able to port all the content over to Google Sites very quickly. You can view the sites at http://ne4ga.org and http://negarcskywarn.com. All you need is a Gmail account and access to you domain DNS records. I’ve done this with Godaddy and Namecheap.com.
As you can see, I was able to use the two domains owned by the club. I wrote up instruction on how I did this and I’ll be happy to send you the link privately.
BKMK
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