Hosting Issues
October 4, 2022 8:19 PM Subscribe
I started a company years ago but finally am getting around to building a website for it. I have interviews highlighting my abilities (as a sort of reel), but the site really intends to promote other work, like interviewing sure, but small producing for documentaries, theater productions, etc.
A lot of my content has, over the years, been spread out in a lot of places; on a local radio station's archive, on Google business sites, my own hard drive.
That last one is what drives this question. As I said, the majority of that stuff is hosted on other sites. If they go down, so does my site since all of its content is now dead until the hosting site comes back up. Can I put a player on my own site and then, load my own mp3s. That's way, I'd have total control over my stuff. Besides that, having it all in one place seems to be a big plus to me.
I know the name recognition of YouTube or Soundcloud is a selling point. But still, is it doable?
That last one is what drives this question. As I said, the majority of that stuff is hosted on other sites. If they go down, so does my site since all of its content is now dead until the hosting site comes back up. Can I put a player on my own site and then, load my own mp3s. That's way, I'd have total control over my stuff. Besides that, having it all in one place seems to be a big plus to me.
I know the name recognition of YouTube or Soundcloud is a selling point. But still, is it doable?
You don't say how you are going to build your website. This will make a difference.
If you build your site with a major site-building service like Squarespace or Wix they will provide easy-to-use, reliable options for hosting video and audio files. You can also get an account at Vimeo to host your own video, and embed it or link to it from your website. What you want to do isn't uncommon, and it should not be hard to set up.
It will be harder to set up self-hosted video if you are building your own site from scratch.
The most difficult part might be getting the original video files, and to a lesser extent audio files. But it should not be hard to host them once you have them.
I don't think you get any reputational credit for having videos on Youtube or audio files on SoundCloud. Anyone can put their stuff up there. Having your material on radio station websites and other actual outlets looks good, and shows that you are real. But you are smart to want to have your own copies of everything, just in case these sites go down or disappear permanently.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 8:45 AM on October 5, 2022 [1 favorite]
If you build your site with a major site-building service like Squarespace or Wix they will provide easy-to-use, reliable options for hosting video and audio files. You can also get an account at Vimeo to host your own video, and embed it or link to it from your website. What you want to do isn't uncommon, and it should not be hard to set up.
It will be harder to set up self-hosted video if you are building your own site from scratch.
The most difficult part might be getting the original video files, and to a lesser extent audio files. But it should not be hard to host them once you have them.
I don't think you get any reputational credit for having videos on Youtube or audio files on SoundCloud. Anyone can put their stuff up there. Having your material on radio station websites and other actual outlets looks good, and shows that you are real. But you are smart to want to have your own copies of everything, just in case these sites go down or disappear permanently.
posted by Winnie the Proust at 8:45 AM on October 5, 2022 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: Thanks very much for these answers.
posted by CollectiveMind at 12:03 PM on October 5, 2022 [2 favorites]
posted by CollectiveMind at 12:03 PM on October 5, 2022 [2 favorites]
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YouTube and SoundCloud probably have better uptime than any web host you can afford, so if it's a question of reliability, I'd urge you to reconsider. There's a lot of infrastructure that the big media hosts make invisible. None of it is magic, but you get access to a lot of their time, expertise and infrastructure by using what they've built, if it works for you. I'm not sure re-inventing the wheel is worth it if your concern is "what if youtube goes down?"
If your concern is linking/embedding something you worked on, but the file is on KXYZ's YouTube/SoundCloud, then it's reasonable to ask "am I covered if the uploader decides to take down this clip later?" I've had some evidence of things I worked on vanish from the internet when a former employer deleted every video featuring me from their youtube presence, and I wish I'd saved copies for my own records. There are probably legal issues around downloading a copy and re-uploading it to your own account, but from a technical perspective, you could do that. If you have the original files and can upload it because you own the rights, then that's trivial.
If the question is "can I stick MP3s on a web server and play them from my own HTML page," the answer is yes. It's been a few years since I did this myself, so I'm useless for specific technical details, but one place you can see exactly this is MeFi Music. If you look at the 'download' link for any given song, you'll see that they're using Amazon AWS for file hosting, and if you view the page source you can see that they're using some HTML backed by Javascript to play the file in the browser. I can't find the specific player code, but I google searched for "Javascript MP3 widget" and found a lot of results.
There's nothing magical about AWS, it's just a way to buy storage (the same thing would work if you had a webserver and just put the files there). I haven't looked to buy hosting in years so I'm not sure about the costs, but that's a thing you can look up.
You may want to figure out a way to make this easier than "manually edit HTML," but how to do that depends on how your homepage is created, and what options the tools you're using have. I'm sure there's Wordpress plugins for this, and finding a good usable/maintainble/not-security-swiss-cheese one is the hard part; likely true for many other tools, though if you're using a "site builder" like Wix or whatnot, they'll probably upcharge you for the privilege of embedding an audio player.
Video is a similar situation. There's nothing technical stopping you from sticking a video file on a web server and embedding a media player in a website. Video files can get large to the point where it may be cost-advantageous to continue using Youtube/Vimeo/etc and accept dependence on their widget/site/infrastructure to avoid dealing with it yourself, though. Many hosting providers charge by a combination of storage ("how much disk space is your content consuming") and bandwidth ("how many copies of your data are we sending to end users?"). If something you serve goes viral, you could end up paying $MANY. For a lot of us that isn't a real concern, but it's worth thinking about, at least.
posted by Alterscape at 5:28 AM on October 5, 2022 [2 favorites]