Web host data transfer rates

[mrpsychotic]

I am going to make a website over winter break with videos steamed from youtube. I have been looking at this web host http://www.fatcow.com. I am on a budget and I can get a year from them for $44. In prior website experiences, cheap hosts I have went with made my site incredibly slow to load. I hadn't looked for these stats before and they weren't made visible. Since I want to stream videos and I don't want to deter potential viewers, I wanted to make sure the next host I went with was fast. I went to their live chat and they told me:

"We have 2gbps network connection with our ISP.
The RAM speed of our servers is 667 MHz."

I want to know if this will be sufficiently fast to stream youtube videos, and how it compares to other web hosts.

Additionally, I would like to know if the web host is any good, or if you have personal recommendations that are affordable and have high speed.

[marianoapp]

if you put a link [or embed] a youtube video in your page the data is streamed directly from youtube's servers to the the person browsing your page... your server is not involved in any way

[mrpsychotic]

O.K. that is good to know.
What about the general parts of my site (ads, logo, structure, comments, forum). Are those statistics good/good enough to run what I want?
Like, if someone's personal isp allows them to type in google.com and have it appear what a human would percieve as nearly instant, how would those stats measure up. 1 second or 2 seconds? 5 seconds?

[GeoffS]

Looks fairly typical of the budget web hosting, very similar to my own except that mine is located in Australia.

You'll be sharing a server with an unknown  number of other user and there's no guarantee of performance or how much CPU bandwith, or memory space you're guaranteed.

The range of applications available is small compared to those my web host offers. In addition, I can install my own applications if I desire. I'd ask about that.

It doesn't mention which operating system the server runs which may not be an issue for you. My guess, given the listed applications, is Linux or BSD.

If you're looking for dedicated physical or virtual servers, it will be much more expensive. Unless you need really fast data streaming, then at $66 per year, it looks like a winner.

[EEVblog]

As someone said, your server does not "stream" the Youtube video, so the load on your server is very low.
Any cheap host will handle that with ease.
My old host (Hostmonster.com) was $6/month and handled half a dozen high traffic web sites including real streaming podcast video without much problem at all.
I'm now with Sitecloud.com "just in case" I get slashdotted or whatever, and for future expansion, but really, my old cheap shared host worked pretty well.

Dave.

[metalphreak]

Dreamhost is also pretty decent. They have a lot of one click setup options that are pretty handy.

If you want the ultimate control over your website/webserver, you can get some pretty cheap Virtual Servers (SliceHost etc) but then you have to configure everything yourself.