I am about to develop a web portal with few thousand users with normal content types, calender and video sharing.
I am new to a large project and chose drupal 7 for it. I have worked on it for smaller websites.

I have to deveop a video gallery. some videos are free some are paid.
I am thinking of doing it 2 of the following ways

  1. small web hosting or a low config VPS server with third party video hosting like vimeo, dailymotion. So a low config server will do the job
  2. or go for a powerful VPS and higher disk space and develop my own video sharing module

Kindly suggest technical point of view.

Comments

JamesOakley’s picture

A lot depends on your budget. Option 2, with video sharing for "a few thousand users", and you'd be looking at a fairly powerful dedicated server. You'd hit CPU / IO limits on almost all VPS plans with that kind of use. (It's not just the amount of storage you have to think about).

So one question, which I take it you've already considered, is how this project will be funded.

Another factor is copyright. You don't say anything about where these videos will come from, but if you offload the videos to a service like vimeo, the copyright holders could go after you for linking to them, but it's far less clearly your responsibility than if you are also hosting those videos. So if you went option 2, as well as needing the right budget, you'd also need to have a strategy in place for handling abuse reports etc.


This signature is currently blank
pankdesign’s picture

the client is the Copyright holder of the videos. He'll make those videos. and want to upload them for registered users only.
we are certainly in a limit for expenditures.
now can you suggest if i should go for third party video hosting providers?
and if I am going for third party video hosting providers should go for a vps or normal webspace plan?

JamesOakley’s picture

In terms of processing power, it certainly sounds like you'd be better off going with a 3rd party video hosting provider. You'd have to work out how to implement that.

It depends how active those users will be.

Do you have any kind of rough idea how many pageloads you might get in an average day? Roughly?

Sites usually grow fairly slowly to begin with, so my guess would be that you could get away with trying a shared host to start. If you choose one that also has VPS provision, they could probably migrate you fairly seamlessly when the time comes. (Actually, migration never need be that painful if you pick a shared host who uses cPanel, because you can then take a VPS with cPanel, and the transfer is very simple to do).


This signature is currently blank
pankdesign’s picture

Thank you so much James... :)
It helped me a lot :D