What is the best hosting package out there for your demoreel?
 

Hi again,

Just wondering what is the best hosting package to host a website with a demoreel?

Is it better to make the website in flash or no flash? With Flash, you can't download someone's pictures which is great for copyright reasons, but will that hurt a person from getting a job?

If a demo reel is on a flash website, what is the compression size usually?

What is the best hosting package out there that wouldn't charge you for the sudden overload of the bandwidth space, let say if you make it to the front page of CGchannel?

What do you think of 1&1, Globat, GoDaddy and the one from CGChannel? Are they worth the price? Reliable?

Any suggestions would be great. Thanks.

Ya i would like to know as well just finished my new reel but dont have a website yet=(

Flash involves buying and learning how to use it (it can be nice and simple for basic animation and things)

Non flash means either:
1) Buying and using a web editor program such as dreameaver. This can make things nice and easy. Some hosting packages have basic wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) editors built in so that you can easily add webpages. They usually use editors such as fckeditor or tinymce which you can look up and try demos of.
2) Learning basic html. Again quite easy to pick up if you look at the html tutorials on sites such as http://www.w3schools.com/

Advanced options include learning a programming language such as php, python, .net etc and building dynamic web pages. You can also learn a database program such as mysql or sql server and hook it in so that you can store and retrieve information easily.
Often web hosting with these options let you use a content management system (CMS) which is a prebuilt application allowing you to easily add webpages (again through a wysiwyg editor) without having to get into the programming side of things. Plenty of these are open source meaning that you dont have to pay anything to use them, you just need to set them up (or get a little help to). Again some webhosts offer these already set up for you to learn. Examples of CMS systems are mambo, drupal, xoops and phpnuke. Loads can be found and demo'ed at http://www.opensourcecms.com/

Hosting of any of the flash and html options should be expected in any web hosting package. Extra options such as having a database or different programming languages add to the cost. Also some hosting packages will give you lots of web space so you can upload large demo movies but some charge for additional space or for using loads of bandwidth. If you are restricted on space then using lower res demoreels posted on youtube or similar could be linked to your site.

You can easily screengrab an image from a flash site and bypass the supposed protection it offers. You can set the compression level of the flash movie to whatever you want when you publish the movie.

Anyway thats just a brief rundown if anyone is interested in getting into that side of things :)

I'm using titanhosts.net as they are one of the fastest in the UK and offer lots of options and flexibility but they might be too much (both feature wise and cost wise for somebody just getting into websites.

Si

For my site, im with GoDaddy ... only thing sucks is that you really cant install server side components which would have helped me out abit.

Marlon