CONTROL YOUR MEDIA
Host your media anywhere: on your existing websites or with any web host you like.
It's your media. You control it. You don't hand over rights to your media like many sites. The rights remain yours because your media remains yours. This is why professionals choose Big Contact.
Be free and host where you want. The hosting industry offers options for every price point - from free to rock solid costly. And new deals will always come from the hosting marketplace faster than any one company can match.
This approach lets us focus on the distribution tools that get your media out there. It means we can offer some services for free that don't require your audience to come back to a banner ad-laden website. This means your media is untethered. It is now free to move around the web - and off the web onto Apple's iTunes, mobile devices... even living rooms.
If you don't currently have a website to host your media and/or your Relay Suites try these:
Pay-As-You-Go Media Hosting
We're a big fan of Amazon's S3, an inexpensive, scalable, simple, pay-as-you-go hosting service for your audio, video or image media files. View their very inexpensive pricing at the link above. You can even use your existing Amazon account.
This is not your typical hosting service. You do not host your Relay Suite or other web pages here. You host your media here. And you do not use a standard FTP application to upload or delete your files. There are open source applications that can be used however:
How to upload and manage your files? We'd suggest the S3Fox Organizer plug-in for the FireFox browser.
2nd choice for Mac OS X: S3 Browser | View ScreenCasts Online's info / video tutorial about this app
2nd choice for Windows: NS3 Manager. Note: we haven't tested this application yet.
Free Hosting
These hosts want your media - not your website. You can use these to host your audio and video files that Feed Players and your media website play. But you can't run Relay Suites on them.
MediaMax.com
Free media hosting: 25gb storage and 1gb of monthly bandwidth. They also offer inexpensive premium plans.Box.net
Free media hosting. 1gb storage and each file must be under 10mb. They also offer inexpensive premium plans.Archive.org
Free media hosting if you allow liberal copyrights.Photobucket.com
Free low-res Flash Flv conversion and hosting as well as a premium plan.
* Data provided as a courtesy. Check sites for latest info.
Shared & Dedicated Hosting
Shared means your files reside on a server with other websites. Dedicated means the server is all yours. Shared hosting can start out as little as $8/mo or so and goes up for better performance. You can use these types of hosts for your audio and video files that Feed Players and your media website play. They (and most other traditional website hosts) can also run Big Contact's Relay Suite. Go for the linux and php-enabled servers.
Media Temple
Dream Host
Mid Phase
Empowering Media
A smaller company which can give attention to its clients
Content Delivery Network
Unlike some hosts which host your media on a single server somewhere, a content delivery network is a network of servers around the globe. When your audience requests media on such a network s/he will get the media from the server that is nearest/quickest to her or him.
Limelight Networks
Used by YouTube, MySpace, MSN and others.BandCon.com
Reseller of LimeLight's CDN and other services