Video sharing hosting and design help

I'm looking for help on creating a website and finding a host for a site that would be for sign language videos. I need my students to interact with the Deaf community and other sign langauge students. I want to create a site similar to youtube but soley for sign langauge videos. It would be nice to have the ability to blog or respond to the videos. I need design help and hosting.

I am a teacher and we have a small grant to get this started. I would be interested in having ads or something to generate income with the site if possible. I only have the ideas.....no idea how to implement them.

Thank you for any help.
Shasta
American Sign Language Teacher

I would say you would be better off buying a pre-made script. Development costs would likely to be higher than the cost of the script. I haven't used them on my own but you can check out
http://www.vshare.in/ (google vshare if the link doesn't show up)
http://www.softplatz.com/software/youtube-script/ (google youtube script).

For the hosting you would likely need to go with something more than shared (VPS / dedicated or some premium shared, when it costs more, but the traffic and resources are guaranteed). Scripts like this use a lot of resources for video conversion and quite a lot of traffic to actually play the videos.

It would be of help if you could specify the budget.

http://phpmotion.com/ is free.

If you host with Cirtex they will even install it for you.

http://www.cirtexhosting.com/scripts/video/

Thank you for the suggestions. I will look into those.

We have $1000 grant. I had originally found a company, Prowebb, that was going to do everything but it was going to cost $3000 but my grant wasn't that big. Also, being in a school system they only pay after the work is done so I have to find someone willing to do that.

I have no idea how scripting works or what it is...... is there someone that can set all that up?

Thank you again.
Shasta

I would say for $1000 you could purchase a pre-made script (or even get one free as I suggested, making one from scratch will cost $1000+) and run it on a dedicated server for about a year or about 2 years on a VPS (not as good as a dedicated (private), but also ok). I, however checked this vshare I posted about previously and it looks quite good actually. I didn't really expect, that for $10 you could buy something like this.

I wouldn't recommend going for the hosting suggested by blackdenton because they are obvious oversellers (meaning selling more resources than they really have). I will not be getting into a lot of details here, but you can read on this forum about what overselling means.

Since this is an important project for you, I strongly recommend searching for some decent provider, so you won't be nervous all the time about how it is running.

Setup of this script option depends on the host. Usually it's something extra, but I think a lot of hosts (especially smaller companies, who cannot afford loosing customers...like mine here ) will happily do that for free.

Hope this helps. It really will depends on how much people do you think will be visiting your site and what kind of quality of service do those people expect from the system. If you could provide some numbers and expectations I think I can give a final advice. But basically the number of people and their expectations from the system will be the deciding factor in what to choose actually.

Okay, I'm still really confused. Is there someone/company that can just do it all? I used to think I was computer savvy but I can't keep up.

As far as numbers.....I'm a dreamer. I would like to think that hundreds of deaf and sign language students will be accessing the site monthly.

I appreciate the help. I'm searching around on here to learn more.

Thanks,
Shasta

Sure there are companies, that will do that for you, but you will need to tell them your expectations and their support team will be able to figure out what you really need. The problem with this approach is that they will probably tell you to get some managed solution (installing custom software is considered a management service, because the administrator from the company has to do work to get it running) and that will cost you more.

About the numbers if you are not certain you should start with something small. Maybe with a low end VPS. Almost any company (that cares about it's reputation) will always help you upgrade to a more powerful VPS when needed.

If you are interested, I could give you a price estimate for doing all those things (setup, basic server monitoring and maintenance) based on my company's pricing, then you could compare and finally decide. I think you will also need a domain name, email (email at your domain) included into the package (so you don't have to worry about anything)?

I tried to post and it didn't go through. I also tried to PM you but it wouldn't let me.

I'm sorry that I don't know a lot and am drawing this out. I do have a domain name.... signlanguagetube ....that I bought with yahoo. It's just been sitting b/c I don't know how to set it up to accept videos and to blog / respond to the videos.

Since I can't post my e-mail for you to contact me so we can work on this you can look me up on myspace and contact me that way. You can search using my first and last name together.


Thank you,
Shasta Grimes

I have sent you a private message and posted an email there. I think the site will allow you to read private messages, to send them, more posts are required.