Complete Guide To Hosting - Part 2

9. Multimedia Support

If multimedia support is important to your site then you really should spend the time (and money) needed to obtain a level of host service that will meet your needs. To be fair, you cannot expect a great deal of support from a budget-price hosting account. Serving multimedia files to your visitors will require considerable of resources, particularly bandwidth.

Flash and Shockwave Animation

While Flash and Shockwave animations appear to be rather dynamic (in the sense that it's possible to change the way they work depending on your systems capabilities), they are in fact rather static in nature. They will work on any server that supports the MIME types that are associated with them and don't require any specialist server software.

Flash and Shockwave presentations can be described as an interactive image, as the presentations themselves are usually just a single file that can be downloaded to your computer before they're started. This can prove to be a problem if you don't want your visitors to be able to store copies of the presentations on their computers, since the full presentation is likely to be downloaded before it can serve its purpose.

Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL)

SMIL is a language that allows greater flexibility in the presentation of audio, video, text, animation and graphics: you can reuse and remix these multimedia elements, reducing the need to create separate clips for each different version of a presentation. SMIL enables users to select viewing options when they're made available (for example to allow for their slow download speed or choice of language).

While not yet as versatile as Flash or Shockwave, SMIL can provide an alternative, as it allows the user and site owner a degree of flexibility around, respectively, the use and combination of multimedia elements available to them on the server. In the future, SMIL could provide a means to incorporate timed elements (for example, rotating banners) into sites without the need for a scripting language.

Streaming Media

The Internet has altered people's expectations of shopping and communication: we now expect things to be much faster than they once were. When given the option to activate a large download as soon as there is enough information buffered to do so (and allow the rest of the data to download in the background), few will instead choose to wait for the download to complete before activation.

Streaming media support is essential if you intend to host something like a live Web cast, and if you're considering such activities, you may need to have a dedicated server set up specifically to deal with the requests and provide the resources needed. Even if you don't broadcast live events, you may still need specialist commercial streaming software to provide the functionality you require.

For a server to be able to stream media data, it needs to have at least one of the three recognized protocols installed:

1. User Datagram Protocol (UDP),


2. RealTime Streaming Protocol (RTSP) or


3. RealTime Protocol (RTP).

The main difference between these protocols and others such as HTTP or FTP is that they will carry on streaming the data regardless of whether a packet was lost in the transmission: data is not retransmitted if it is lost.

The most enjoyable multimedia presentations are those that you can control. RTSP is a two way streaming protocol that allows the visitor to interact with the media by sending messages back to the server to control which part of the presentation to send next. Of course, you can expect to pay considerably more for a server that supports RTSP as opposed to RTP.

How much? How Fast?

However you decide to serve your multimedia files to the world, there is one thing you can be sure of: they will use a lot of bandwidth and data transfer. It's not uncommon for audio and video clip files to top a megabyte -- multiply that by even a modest number and you'll begin to see the problems associated with offering a few large files on your site, even if they aren't accessed all that often.

You should consider your data transfer quota carefully, as frequent requests for large files will see your data transfer totals explode! It's always a good idea to find out what the additional transfer costs will be, and even the service level provider that will provide the bandwidth. Some people prefer to steer clear of low fees for additional data transfer, believing that you get what you pay for and that the price reflects the quality of service that a host can provide.

If you are going to make use of any kind of streaming media, then the quality of bandwidth can become very important to you. These are the kinds of situations when you really should start to think about a host with a burstable bandwidth plan, as while you may pay that little extra for it each month, you really don't want to end up broke because of your bandwidth usage!