What Hosting Plan To Get

[QHF]

A new business opportunity has been presented to me and the more I think about it, it’s not a matter of if but when I pull the trigger. Due to my past experience here GlowHost, having first hand knowledge of your expertise and outstanding customer support; you are my first and only choice for a hosting company.

But I need some guidance as to the type of hosting plan to purchase based on what I want to accomplish, which is providing a main website with a link to a secure website, (user id and password required to access), that subscribers can go and view a live web cam video stream 24/7 or download saved video from a secure FTP site for viewing at a later date. By the way, this does not involve any Adult Content.

The basic outline is to register a Domain and create a main website with information about our service, a contact form for inquiries, a login form that will direct subscribers to a secure website, and sign up form if they want to subscribe. I’m not sure how to proceed; I’ve always dealt with a single site with a very basic contact form, so I need to ask a few questions:

· I’ve always used FrontPage but would like to go with a more versatile editor, one that can readably accept payment gateways and merchant accounts, any recommendations?
· From the main website will an add-on domain or sub-domain be needed for the secure site access, or should a totally independent domain be registered and website created?
· When a subscriber logs onto the secure site, I would like to have them see only the video from their web cam and an option to view the live stream or download video files that have been saved to a secure FTP site. Would this be possible?
· As far as saving video files to an FTP site, is it possible to limit the time the files are retained? What I’m asking is whether an FTP site can be setup to automatically dump files older than say, seven days or would this be a manual process.

I don’t know how to figure out the potential bandwidth requirements; I’m assuming it has to do with how many subscribers are logged on at any given time. Disk capacity needed is another issue I’m not sure how to calculate which leads me to ask does live streaming consume disk space? I know saving to an FTP site will use disk space but how much, I would think is again depended on the number of subscribers and the total number of files saved and the file size. This leads back to the type of hosting plan best suited for what I want to accomplished. There will be many more questions as this project goes along, so any help is greatly appreciated. Please feel free to ask any questions you need to ask, there’s no doubt I’ve left out a lot of detail, but so far these are the broad strokes. I look forward to a mutually profitable experience.

[Matt]

Regarding your HTML editor question, I don't know of any that have gateway support built into them. This is usually something you would have programmed in PHP or you might use an open source script like the shopping carts found in Fantastico which have gateway support built into the PHP source code.

No, you don't need a subdomain for secure site access, you can tackle this problem in 2 ways: Use a PHP script to manage logins, or, use cPanel's password protected directories option but the latter option means making logins manually in cPanel for each user as opposed to a script which can generate them on the fly.

Regarding if it is possible to view a live stream or download the video, sure, anything is possible it all depends on your HTML and PHP code. If you ember the video in the page or simple provide a link to the file would be what determines the available download options for the site visitor.

Regarding trashing old videos, sure, I am sure something could be written in PHP to check the time stamp of a file and then set up a cron job to execute this script every day so that it removes files older than "X" days.

Sounds to me like you might want to shop around for a programmer as I cannot think of any scripts that perform all of these functions "out of the box."

Streaming doesn't consume diskspace, other than the file that you are streaming. Streaming consumes bandwidth / transfer. If you have 100 meg file, then it would consume 100 megs of disk space and then it would consume 100 megs transfer each time it was completely downloaded.