Media Hosting For Your Membership Site or Online Course
Most membership sites, will have a need to protect the following types of media: Video, Audio, PDF, Zip, Word Docs – well, don’t use word unless you have to, because not everyone would have word installed, but you get the idea. Different types of files need to be protected. But for the most part, we’re talking about video, audio and PDF reports.
If these files are stored right on your web site, AND if you have a bunch of these files that are also big in size – like over 10 MB, for eg., then a lot of your members viewing and downloading them from your site simultaneously will use up a lot of resources on your server – when I say resources, I mean server memory, server speed, server bandwidth, etc – basically your site can get overloaded. Which means your site could slow down considerably.
Have you heard of the “Digg Effect” or “Slashdot Effect”? Many years ago, there used to be a social bookmark sharing site called Digg.com. If you have heard of Reddit.com, then Digg and Reddit were competitors. Big time traffic on both sites. Digg just slowly went away. But getting your site’s URL on the front page of Digg, meant that you could end up getting tens of thousands of visitors in a very short time period. And that usually crashed most WordPress sites that were on shared hosting. Which is why WordPress unfortunately got a bad rap years ago. And things have changed a lot since then, and there are tools you can use today to make sure your site can withstand a sudden influx of traffic.
But I’m not talking about just site visitors. I’m talking about a large number of your visitors and paying members, downloading PDF’s, watching video, listening to audio, and if all of those files are stored on your site, then your site could end up becoming super slow, and then might eventually even crash. And your host will have to restart your server, and then the whole thing could happen all over again.
On top of that, there are also bandwidth charges that your host will charge you, for all of those downloads, which are usually not very cheap.
Don’t put too much faith in your web host’s “Unlimited Bandwidth” clause, because if you read the fine-print carefully, you’ll see that as per their TOS, if you consume large amounts of bandwidth and use too much of the server resources, this could cause other web sites (belonging to others) on the same server to slow down and have a degrade in performance, especially if you are on a shared hosting account.
And your host could consider this as abuse of their terms of service, and they could either slap you with huge bandwidth or server utilization fees, or ask you to upgrade to a more expensive hosting package, or may even ask you to take your web site elsewhere because you’re causing issues for other site owners on the same server.
Instead, if your media files are stored on Amazon S3….
Listen to the episode for the rest of the details.
Links Mentioned On The Show
Easy Video Player (aff)
S3FlowShield (aff)
Hosting: Liquid Web (aff)
CoolCastPlayer Launch
As you probably know, I just did a beta launch of my new WordPress plugin. It is officially the prettiest podcast player on the planet.
Let me tell you about my new podcast player plugin, and why it’s different from anything else you’ve ever seen before.
It’s called CoolCastPlayer, and you can see it in action at CoolCastPlayer.com
All of that in today’s episode. Listen to the show via the player above.
Or if you want all of the episodes to be automatically downloaded to your device as soon as they’re available, then subscribe to the show on iTunes at SubscribeMe.fm/itunes/ , or on Stitcher at SubscribeMe.fm/stitcher/ .
Cheers!
– Ravi Jayagopal
PS: Yeah, the player above, is powered by CoolCastPlayer 🙂
Check out the full podcast below…
