Video Hosting

[DavidIsCrazy]

okay long story short:

A model friend of mine has me as her tech guy, I've been helping her with video hosting for over a year. she's not good with tech stuff so I do it for her. First Megaupload went down, now MediaFire started killing off the files one by one.

Any ideas on another site to host videos for download, prefferably one that's free. Password protection would be really nice but right now I need a solution quickly so she doesn't have to send tons of files via wetransfer.

 

[Jessi]

Most of the time if you're hosting lots of files, or large files, you will need a subscription.
I know camredeem is free while its in Beta. I like it a lot, but there are some problems so Im still using mediafire.

 

[LilyMarie]

You can host files up to 2 GB on a free Dropbox account. Password-protect them using WinRar

 

[BlueViolet]

I bought a domain and only use it for file hosting with godaddy.com. I really don't know much about web hosting stuff, all I know is I have a domain address and like 150 GB of file hosting a year.

It cost like around $60 if I remember correctly and I'm very satisfied with it because I can upload really high quality videos and using like a very small percentage of how much I actually can use, but the 10 GB plan isn't nearly enough for me. And all my stuff is password protected and you don't even have to download the files to watch them if you have the password, which is pretty cool.

I tried megaupload until it went down, and mediafire just annoys me. I think it's worth it to just pay for something good.

Also, godaddy.com's support is the best support I've ever dealt with in my life. Anytime I've ever spoken with anyone on the phone, they are super polite and helpful and easy to understand, and they call you to confirm you've ordered service with them as well.

 

[MyCamgirl]

What Dakota said. Paying for a hosting service seems to be the best plan. If 150GB isn't enough, GoDaddy has an unlimited storage plan for $90/year. You can either use RAR with password to protect the file or use htpasswd on the server.

There is also Amazon S3. $0.095/GB (storage) and $0.120/GB (transfer out). Upload is free. You can pay 1 cent/GB if the file is in the Glacier storage. They allow adult stuff.

Keep in mind that it is not clear if the popular free cloud services allow adult stuff. Except for Microsoft’s SkyDrive, that does not allow adult, all the major players (Google Drive, DropBox..) are not clear about that or avoid giving a straight answer.

 

[DavidIsCrazy]

What Dakota said. Paying for a hosting service seems to be the best plan. If 150GB isn't enough, GoDaddy has an unlimited storage plan for $90/year. You can either use RAR with password to protect the file or use htpasswd on the server.

There is also Amazon S3. $0.095/GB (storage) and $0.120/GB (transfer out). Upload is free. You can pay 1 cent/GB if the file is in the Glacier storage. They allow adult stuff.

Keep in mind that it is not clear if the popular free cloud services allow adult stuff. Except for Microsoft’s SkyDrive, that does not allow adult, all the major players (Google Drive, DropBox..) are not clear about that or avoid giving a straight answer.

does Amazon S3 have a hotlink or some sort? or does it also require a website

 

[MyCamgirl]

does Amazon S3 have a hotlink or some sort? or does it also require a website

How do i prevent hotlinking on Amazon S3 without using signed URLs?

Also, from Amazon S3's page (Protecting your data):

Data Security Details
Amazon S3 supports several mechanisms that give you flexibility to control who can access your data as well as how, when, and where they can access it.

There is a "AWS Free Tier" which offers 5GB: "New AWS customers will be able to run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance and a free Amazon RDS Micro Instance for a year, while also leveraging a free usage tier for Amazon S3". Maybe you could try that and see if you/your friend feel comfortable with Amazon's system.

It is important to note that Amazon is not just a storage service in the cloud. Perhaps it offers more tools than you want. If you want something simple, a classic hosting service like GoDaddy may be a better solution.

 

[Zoomer]

I use lunarpages for my hosting, but I use it as intended (i.e. webhosting, not filehosting). Therein lies the rub, as they say. You may struggle to find cheap webhosting accounts that are willing to be filehosting accounts.

Not particularly sure why they would care - the "webhosting" they offer is about $7 a month for unlimited bandwidth and "unlimited" storage (note the inverted commas) - which is why I bring them up. You may find webhosting is a cheap and efficient way (plus many offer 1 click services to install things like CMS systems, blogs, whatever).

I think major questions to be answered before giving any real recommendation is:
1) File sizes.
2) Download frequency.
3) File Frequency.

If there is just 1 file per month and its downloaded 10 times and it's only 100Mb then you don't require much.
If there are 5 files per week, 1 Gb in size, and each downloaded on average 50 times a week - you need something with either unlimited bandwidth, or 1Tb bandwidth type deals.

You can password protect the files, and with file hosts, password protect the entire directory that is holding said files too
I don't think many hosts have issues with adult material per se as long as its within the law, but you should definitely check if you go the pair route.

With free hosting, you kinda get what you pay for. They'll want to make money via adverts displayed to downloaders. I doubt many have links with adult related downloads, and I doubt many advertisers would want their adverts displayed when users are downloading porn - hence the issues

 

[IvyThornton]

I use godaddy for my clips and site. There having a sale right now too. There unlimited is $96/yr I just have the 150 GB right now and thats on sale for $50/yr Pretty good deal and they have awesome tech support.

 

[Jessi]

Mediafire is now useless. everything has been flagged as adult, even after re-upping my files with non-explicit names. Help!?!?!?

 

[Anonymous]

Mediafire is now useless. everything has been flagged as adult, even after re-upping my files with non-explicit names. Help!?!?!?

DAMN. Cam girls get no love from PayPal...then there was that whole mess with ePassporte...now we gotta worry that the videos we create/edit and PAY to have stored on MediaFire might get flagged? WTF? I've seen a few other posts from other models too, about MediaFire removing their videos.

 

[Shaun__]

Mediafire is now useless. everything has been flagged as adult, even after re-upping my files with non-explicit names. Help!?!?!?

Are you uploading your files as password locked zip files?

 

[Zoomer]

Mediafire is now useless. everything has been flagged as adult, even after re-upping my files with non-explicit names. Help!?!?!?

I'm going to make an assumption which may explain things. There is something called a "hash" which will be generated when you upload a file. It is, basically, a fingerprint of said file. It probably looks like ab234c5kfu559306jsg11udjm57773kd (yes, I just hit random keys - but it's usually just [a-z0-9] characters only).

So when a file gets flagged, that fingerprint is flagged. That fingerprint lives in a database somewhere.
All files being uploaded will be hashed and stored. If the hash exists already, they probably don't actually store the file again - they just create another link to an existing file.

Those links are entries in a db which can be deleted. Say 1000 people upload the same 1Gb file - instead of requiring 1Tb of diskspace, they use only 1Gb of disk space and 1000 entries in a db (which may be less than 100kb of data). Each of those entries points to the same file, and the file is only removed when the last entry is deleted from the db (either through users deleting the "file" themselves (their entry) or when they time out after a period of not being used).

At least that's my assumption. It makes complete sense (imo) as this minimises the disk space hosting companies provides, and helps them to also combat piracy and so on (as once a file is flagged, anyone trying to upload said file will find that it's automatically removed AND reporting one file will ensure all instances of it are dealt with at the same time.

Note, this makes sense but isn't necessarily true

So when you want to upload a file that's been removed - I suggest you do something to change it's file hash. This may be zipping said file up and then adding a plain text file to the zip which just holds the days date. That'll produce a different hash for the zip file. However, programmatically it is easy to extract the contents of a zip file and find the file hash on each part of it - so maybe password protect too

I doubt, very strongly, that anyone is actually opening said files to look at them from mediafire. They just get reported and taken down instead. Change the file hash, hopefully solve the problem.

 

[Anna_Swallows]

Crap....all mine are on mediafire.

What about Rapidshare?? I bought some videos from a model and hers were on this site.

 

[MyCamgirl]

Crap....all mine are on mediafire.

From MediaFire's Terms of service:

General Use of the Service, Permissions and Restrictions
Distribute Content that is libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, abusive, harassing, threatening, unlawful or promotes or encourages illegal activity;

If you don't name your files with obvious porn names, MediaFire won't catch you. But if someone reports a file, MediaFire will take a look and remove it. Protecting with password may not help because the person reporting your file will also know the password and provide it to MediaFire so they can open the RAR. You can't host porn not even if you pay for a premium membership.

What about Rapidshare??

RapidShare is maybe the oldest free file hosting around. But as they are heavily used for piracy. If RapidShare decide to handle the piracy issue for real (and there are groups pushing them to do so), they may ban porn to reduce the number of copyright infringements, which I believe is the reason MediaFire does not allow porn.

If you want a safe and reliable place (this is key) where you can host your naughty videos for free, there are not many options. Most of the sites either don't allow porn or can be shut down any moment. I am saying this assuming you have tons of videos or large files. If you just have 2 or 3 videos with only a few megas, you could probably upload them to any free hosting and if the site shuts down or they delete your files, you just upload again using the trick zoomer mentioned.

 

[MyCamgirl]

There is also Amazon S3. $0.095/GB (storage) and $0.120/GB (transfer out). Upload is free. You can pay 1 cent/GB if the file is in the Glacier storage. They allow adult stuff.

I've been playing around with this...

First thing, the Glacier thing ($0.01/GB) isn't a valid plan for sharing. That service is intended for backups that are rarely read. Pulling data from there costs too much to be used as sharing service. Also, it may take 3-5 hours before a file can be available for download. It is clearly a backup option.

Amazon S3 is the right option. But then, you pay $0.095/GB to store files and $0.12/GB to download. Some girls would have to consider compressing their videos a little more. I've bought videos with 10-15 minutes that take more than 1GB, which is a lot. Every time you sell a 1GB video, you will be paying 12 cents to Amazon, plus 9 cents/month to host that video. You'd have to do some math to see if delivering your videos via Amazon is still profitable in your case.

By the way, when sharing a file on Amazon, you can set the URL to expire at specific date. Quite helpful to avoid that URL from being shared with others and also in case someone decide to harm you (financially) by downloading the same file multiple times.

S3 can also be used to backup, which is what I am going to do with critical data.

 

[Camgirlvids]

A little self promotion here... Video hosting specific to cam models www.camgirlvids.com

We've just launched but I believe we have the kinks worked out. Sign up and I'll upgrade you to a month of premium free. Upload a file and get a stack of 1day free premium codes to share with your customers!

 

[Jessi J]

I used Amazon S3 until some asshole gave out the links and over 600gb worth of content was downloaded and spread around the internet.

That month it cost me almost $100 out of my pocket to pay for it.
I had to rip down every single link with DMCA's and move all of those files to something no one could find.
On top of that the way the folders were set up, tech savvy people were able to look through ALL of the folders on my S3 and download ALL videos instead of just whatever I had sent them. So not worth it.

Use dropbox, it's wayyy easier and a simple name change should change the URL of the video. You can even move videos from folder to folder without having to reupload.

 

[Zoomer]

Must admit, I am always in awe of the amount of people who try to take a slice of the cake associated with camming. People creating/offering upload services, new cam sites, "financial tools". Yes, tools available to you - but they're still after a tasty slice and people seem to give away too much (after all, the "service" isn't a company by any stretch and you're giving them free everything at the same time in the case of file hosting).

Given bandwidth is super cheap, and with a tiny bit of effort, i'd still recommend getting your own web hosting deal and going from there.

You could set up individual FTP access for many other models if you wish, with their own accounts to access specific directories. You can prevent people "discovering" your files by using an empty html document in the directory (as index.html etc). Websites will have a cpanel with tracking tools that will display the ip's arriving, what url / link they clicked (if applicable), what time, location, frequency etc of how often the file was visited. You can password protect entire directories and rename files at a drop of the hat.

Of course, it isn't as simple as using the interface provided by others... but you'd have ultimate control of your own stuff AND many camgirls could band together to pay for it. My site costs $80 per year, and I've terrabytes of bandwidth and storage laying dormant.

If I had spare time, I'd create a script that all could use to create your own upload site (well, set of scripts). As it is, I currently have neither the time nor internet connection. Maybe in a few weeks. Maybe. Will see. Could be fun.

 

[Camgirlvids]

Which is exactly what I did.

FTP access is nice, and a lot of girls are pretty tech savvy but even more aren't and there are some user errors that can easily derail a novice user. I spent time researching hosting, scripts, Tos, privacy policies, everything to cater to cam models (my lady played a big part in this) and developed something very user friendly.

As far as tryin to take a slice....unlimited hosting has a cost. I think $5 or less a month per user is a pretty small price to ask, to help cover costs really!

Must admit, I am always in awe of the amount of people who try to take a slice of the cake associated with camming. People creating/offering upload services, new cam sites, "financial tools". Yes, tools available to you - but they're still after a tasty slice and people seem to give away too much (after all, the "service" isn't a company by any stretch and you're giving them free everything at the same time in the case of file hosting).

Given bandwidth is super cheap, and with a tiny bit of effort, i'd still recommend getting your own web hosting deal and going from there.

You could set up individual FTP access for many other models if you wish, with their own accounts to access specific directories. You can prevent people "discovering" your files by using an empty html document in the directory (as index.html etc). Websites will have a cpanel with tracking tools that will display the ip's arriving, what url / link they clicked (if applicable), what time, location, frequency etc of how often the file was visited. You can password protect entire directories and rename files at a drop of the hat.

Of course, it isn't as simple as using the interface provided by others... but you'd have ultimate control of your own stuff AND many camgirls could band together to pay for it. My site costs $80 per year, and I've terrabytes of bandwidth and storage laying dormant.

If I had spare time, I'd create a script that all could use to create your own upload site (well, set of scripts). As it is, I currently have neither the time nor internet connection. Maybe in a few weeks. Maybe. Will see. Could be fun.

 

[Zoomer]

Depends, I have "unlimited" storage, unlimited bandwidth, mysql databases, cpanel, various statistic tools etc for $5 per month.

Alternatively, I could just host my own (if I had a very nice fast connection of course!).

So how much does your unlimited cost?

 

[Camgirlvids]

We're charging $5 a month for unlimited, $25 for 6 months, or $45 for a year. Sign up. and I'll upgrade your account for a month.

When you create an account, you have the option to insert your own ad code so every download link you send has whatever advertisement you put on it, or none. We DO NOT have ads anywhere else on the site, and hope to not have to ever put ads up.

As an added bonus at random intervals we'll send out "Premium" codes. it allows whomever you choose to have premium access for a full day, for free.

Again, not trying to get rich, just cover costs.

 

[Zoomer]

We're charging $5 a month for unlimited, $25 for 6 months, or $45 for a year. Sign up. and I'll upgrade your account for a month.

When you create an account, you have the option to insert your own ad code so every download link you send has whatever advertisement you put on it, or none. We DO NOT have ads anywhere else on the site, and hope to not have to ever put ads up.

As an added bonus at random intervals we'll send out "Premium" codes. it allows whomever you choose to have premium access for a full day, for free.

Again, not trying to get rich, just cover costs.

You misunderstood. I asked what the cost of hosting was. As in your cost to run it. What host, what contract (hosting package) etc?
I am not saying you shouldn't be able to make money via creating something. Its your choice what you charge, and others choice to pay it. Just interested in honesty and transparency

 

[Zoomer]

Which is exactly what I did.

FTP access is nice, and a lot of girls are pretty tech savvy but even more aren't and there are some user errors that can easily derail a novice user. I spent time researching hosting, scripts, Tos, privacy policies, everything to cater to cam models (my lady played a big part in this) and developed something very user friendly.

You've grabbed my curiosity somewhat. What, exactly, have you done? More precisely, what work have you done on this site? What is "your" work?