?Can I use Yahoo small business web hosting site as server?

Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 10

Hi Everybody,

I've searched the web and read a lot of posts here, but I'm still confuzzled. I'm brand new to RSS, and all I want to do is submit some video podcasts to iTunes.

I have a very simple Yahoo hosted site that includes at least one .m4v video. Using FeedForAll, is that the only 'server' that I need? All the tutorials keep jumping past that part.

Also, once a video is available at iTunes, are the user downloads going to be from Apple.com or is each download going to come from my website? Obviously a concern about who's paying for the bandwidth.

Thanks,

TW

Joined: 24 Feb 2005 Posts: 648

TWood wrote:

Hi Everybody,

I've searched the web and read a lot of posts here, but I'm still confuzzled. I'm brand new to RSS, and all I want to do is submit some video podcasts to iTunes.

I have a very simple Yahoo hosted site that includes at least one .m4v video. Using FeedForAll, is that the only 'server' that I need? All the tutorials keep jumping past that part.

Also, once a video is available at iTunes, are the user downloads going to be from Apple.com or is each download going to come from my website? Obviously a concern about who's paying for the bandwidth.

Thanks,

TW

You are responsible for hosting the feed and the podcast files too. This can use a lot of bandwidth just for the .xml file. iTunes sofware will check the Apple servers for updates to the .xml file, but fetch the audio/video files from your server. However, any other new reader programs will fetch the .xml file from your website. And a lot of users configure their news readers to check for updates several times per hour. Your other option is to use a company specifically designed for hosting RSS and podcasting. I know there are several, but www.libsyn.com is the only one I can remember at the moment.

Jim

Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 10

Thanks Jim,

I use Yahoo's free website builder - SiteBuilder, which is very basic drag and drop. It presently doesn't really support .mp4 files, let alone .m4v, but if I am careful with them I can get it to use them. Once uploaded to the site, would FFA/RSS interact with SiteBuilder in any way that might cause SiteBuilder to balk?

I guess what I'm really asking, is how -exactly- does FFA/RSS store and retrieve information from my site? Does it place a folder there with the XML file inside, or what? And then the XML file points RSS to the media file(s) on the website? I'm having trouble understanding it in very simple terms.

Thanks,

TW

Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 10

PS: My Yahoo basic plan allows 25GB of transfer per month, plus $1 per GB over that. My podcasts are about 11MB in size. Setting aside the XML traffic for a moment, am I doing the math right and estimating that I could transfer one podcast about 22,700 times per month under the basic plan?

TW

Joined: 24 Feb 2005 Posts: 648

TWood wrote:

PS: My Yahoo basic plan allows 25GB of transfer per month, plus $1 per GB over that. My podcasts are about 11MB in size. Setting aside the XML traffic for a moment, am I doing the math right and estimating that I could transfer one podcast about 22,700 times per month under the basic plan?

TW

The XML is likely the killer. Lets say your XML is 5Kbytes. And lets assume 100 of your subscribers have their feed readers set to check for updates every 10 minutes, and ceck from 8am until 10pm, 6 days a week.

That works out to be 5K * 100 * 6 times/hours * 14 hours * 6 days/week * 4 weeks/month = 1,008,000K/month = 985Meg/month

Now that is not 25GB, but you can see that a few people that continously check for update can consume a LOT of bandwidth. The XML may not look like the biggest consumer of bandwidth, but it will consume more then you might think.

But your plan at 25GB/month should be good for awhile, I would think.

Jim

Joined: 05 Feb 2006 Posts: 10

Thanks Jim,

Sorry to keep bugging you, but could you comment on my questions in my other post above - about SiteBuilder?

The last step in the FFA tutorial says: Save and FTP the feed to your server.

I don't understand what happens at that point, what it actually sends to my website and how that interacts with the rest of the site.

TW

Joined: 24 Feb 2005 Posts: 648

TWood wrote:

Thanks Jim,

Sorry to keep bugging you, but could you comment on my questions in my other post above - about SiteBuilder?

The last step in the FFA tutorial says: Save and FTP the feed to your server.

I don't understand what happens at that point, what it actually sends to my website and how that interacts with the rest of the site.

TW

I don't know what "SiteBuilder" is. But the "Save and FTP" steps are. Save you feed onto you disk, as is done with all work. Then you can either us FeedForAll's builtin FTP to upload the XML file to your webserver, or you can use what ever means you perfer. Currently you have to upload any enclosure files separtely.

Jim