gmane.education.web4lib

Media Hosting Options - Recommendations?

Hi!

Our library is looking at the cost/benefit issues related to hosting media
in-house vs. hosting it externally with a free or paid service.  We are
exploring the various options out there (e.g. YouTube for videos), but are
wondering if any of the wonderful web librarians out there have had this
experience themselves.  We're worried that the cost of upping our bandwidth
in order to adequately host multimedia will cost more than we can afford, or
more than the benefit it will afford us.  Hosting on outside sites, though,
carries its own risks such as a lack of reliable data archiving, possible
ads, lack of branding, etc.

So, if you've hosted multimedia at your library internally, please tell us
how that's going.  And if you've hosted it externally, please let us know
that as well, including any data you have on the cost, storage limits,
bandwidth limits, terms of agreement and privacy issues, ads, and so forth.

Any information is appreciated - so don't hold back!

Sarah Houghton-Jan

Digital Futures Manager, San José Public Library

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Cary Gordon | 2 Jul 17:09

Re: Media Hosting Options - Recommendations?

You might want to consider Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) <http://aws.amazon.com/s3 
 > for your media. It is not free, but I think that there is no way  
that you can host this in a high performance environment for anything  
close to what they charge. There is even an inexpensive ($20) front  
end called JungleDisk <http://www.jungledisk.com/> that you can use to  
manage your files.

I think that many potential users are intimidated by the S3 pricing  
model and have been put off by the perception that you need to be a  
developer to use it. JungleDisk helps solve the latter, and a little  
time doing projections will show that you can't really beat the price.

Don McAskill of the SmugMug photo hosting site estimated that he saved  
about $25k/month over what he was paying for storage in a datacenter.  
While most libraries aren't in the $70k/year storage costs range that  
they had, the savings are bigger at lower levels.

Cary Gordon
The Cherry Hill Company
http://www.chillco.com

On Jul 1, 2008, at 4:49 PM, Houghton-Jan, Sarah wrote:

> Hi!
>
>
>
> Our library is looking at the cost/benefit issues related to hosting  
> media
> in-house vs. hosting it externally with a free or paid service.  We

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