Hi Luis, way off topic but i need to ask a computer guru a question and you always take time out to answer my questions. Thanks for that.

Here it is… I want to make available for sale 30 minute videos that customers can download from my web site. They are educational videos and will change every week. I asked a Japanese guy about it and he said I needed to have my own server and such–big bucks.

Anyway what do you think?

Thanks for the advice.
Matthew

Matthew:

You don’t necessarily need your own server, unless you plan really high-end or high-volume business. If you’re just selling 100MB movies to a few hundred people a week, for example, a lower-end web host (shared server) would do the trick.

You can buy a domain for $9/year, and get good web hosting for $65/year (I have several domains, and pay the $120/year hosting plan). I use GoDaddy for the domain, and Surpass Hosting for the web host. For a more detailed post, see this entry and this one. They’re a few years old, but the basic principles are the same.

The $65/year hosting plan gets you 5GB of disk space, 200 GB data transfer per month, and the usual host of free scripts and services a web host provides. They do provide storefront software, but I have no experience in using that stuff myself, so I don’t know how easy or hard it is. The simplest solution would be to get their payment directly, and then provide them with a password to a password-protected directory on the site which has the video.

This all depends on how large your videos are in MB/GB, and how many you think you’ll sell per month. If your movies are bigger or you have a bigger client list, you can just pay more to get more bandwidth.

Let me know if you need any info beyond this.