Bandwidth using site. Very profitable.

I have a project in mind, youtube like site. I posses the technologies, but I haven't yet started the work, because I know hosts for this are hard to find.

The server must be in the EU.
For the beginning I think 4-5 GB are enough. And lotsa bandwidth.

I'm looking for something free at the beginning because I don't quite have money to pay. I'll pay as long as the site grows up.

Good luck with that, but don't expect to get anything reliable. "Lotsa" bandwidth = "lotsa" money.

... I know it's hard to find.... Very.. ..I said that.... but, I have no money to spare atm.

My recommendation to you is this:
Install the appropriate software on your local machine and develop the site there. Perfect it to a "T". Make it glisten and then shop the completed product around.

You'll have much more luck showing off a pristine piece of software to investors and getting what you need rather than convincing someone that you have a new "idea". People that pay that much money for bandwidth do not like taking risks on things that don't give a good Return on Investment.

Thanks for the tip. I thought at that, but I didn't have enough arguments to sustain my development. I'll bbl :P

Nope, this will not work either. I can get you a youtube clone for $30 on freelance websites. There are already a lot of those available.
And the problem is not only with the bandwidth: once you start converting those uploaded videos to flash you will see, that your CPU is at 100% all the time.

Please explain how developing it locally and then pitching it to investors won't work because "your CPU is 100% all the time". The CPU and bandwidth issue is not an issue during development. Sure, if you ran the site from your home PC, yea, you'd see a problem. But I didn't suggest that. I suggested that he develop it locally, pitch it to investors, and then launch it and optimize it, rather than pitching a blank "idea".

Trust me, it will work. I've done it numerous times without the help of "freelance kiddies".

I agree with Adrastea... I'd much rather sponsor a site that has a bit of a user base and reputation rather than one that is just a plan. Being able to see effort on the part of the maker shows dedication.

For example, if you go to purchase a car, they want a down payment to insure that you have something at stake, instead of it just being a car loan.

I meant could be a problem for hosting. Even if you have 5 users using it you will need a dedicated machine, as video conversion is resource consuming.
I bet youtube runs some delegating mechanims for grid conversions or a huge cluster to convert videos.
So the 100% CPU is also a question later: how will you distribute the load between machines. With a venture like this you got to think how will you expand later, as believe me, if you get successful you will have to do. And for this to work you will need to write some system software also (not just a website).
I know of a company, who has done it in smaller scale, than youtube and they run a 4CPU/8core server (and that was not so cheap). 6 cores are dedicated to video conversion and 2 more for uploads / hash checks / integrity checks, etc. That said, they can convert 6 videos in real-time (only) on 1 machine. So if you get a 100MB 10 minute video you will need 10 minutes (well, roughly) to convert.
So this is really a huge question of profitable or not: once you get a lot of users you will get issues with conversions to flash and will need to scale or your website will slow down to a crawl.

And I do agree, that it is better to buy a ready-made clone and improve, it ain't easy to do this kind of thing from scratch.

That isn't necessarily true. I'm presently hosting a few people who have video sites. It really isn't difficult to convert the video at all - and any good conversion software doesn't really bog down the server at all.

At first, I figured I would buy a server just to host resource-hungry sites, such as video sharing and whatnot, but it doesn't seem to be an issue at all. The machine has a Intel Core2 Duo E6600 processor, and it's peaked at around 50% usage with three sites running off of it - most of which getting close to 500k page views per month. The only thing it will drain, for certain, is bandwidth. Like crazy.

You don't need to make any software at all to run a similar site to YouTube. All it requires is a video player, a scripting language of some sort for the site's frontend and backend, as well as a little bit of time and patience.

Also, I don't recall anyone saying anything about using a pre-developed script, other than you. I hate to break it to you, but it really isn't that hard to create something like YouTube. A determined programmer could do it in a week, if they really wanted to.

My suggestion to the topic starter, matzipan, is to continue developing it on your local machine. Once you get a feel for what you would require, you should start looking for potential investors. If you show that you will develop a rather large user-base in a very short amount of time, I'm sure you'd find some people tossing money at you. Of course, they'd require something out of their investment, which of course you'd need to provide.

It's a good idea. If you want to go ahead with it, do it. Don't let what others say convince you otherwise. I personally think you're heading in the right direction, IF you can manage to find a way to stand out from the competition. You do have some big competition there, but don't let it discourage you.

Once you get to the point where you have a working product and a decent userbase, hit me up and I'm sure we could work something out. Until then, however, good luck with your project. I hope it all goes well.

Since I've seen the other's post I sat down and tought ... How the heck could it use so much resources.

I'll try and further develop it as far as the summer holiday begins