Hosting is a very important part of social media that I’ve neglected to write about on this blog. There are so many options (free and paid) that it really is hard to know exactly who to go with at any given time.

I’ve heard it recommended by Todd Cochrane that its a good idea to host your media files on a separate server than your actual website if you’re podcasting. This is because the high bandwidth demands of rich media can bring your server to a crawl, thereby slowing the delivery of your pages. Given this possibility it might make sense to have one host for media delivered via podcast and another host for applications and files.

I use this approach for most of my podcasting needs with LibSyn hosting the media files and Dreamhost handling the applications. So far the combo has worked pretty well. Both are low cost providers that provide very nice features for the cost. Both companies have been maligned due to hiccups in service associated with growing pains. These companies innovate though and that means a lot to those who are passionate about social media.

Dreamhost has just announced another innovation in hosting that is very interesting indeed. They’re calling this new innovation Files Forever. The feature is designed as a shot across the bow of DRM based media distribution companies. In fact, iTunes is prominently mentioned in the Dreamhost announcement.

In a nutshell, the new service is designed to allow people to pay a one time storage fee for uploading files. No DRM allowed on the files. Once uploaded, files will be made available “forever”. I’m always weary when someone promises to do something for eternity because any number of things could happen to make “forever” a much shorter period of time.

You can make files available free or you can sell them. Dreamhost handles all the payment processing. A huge difference between the Dreamhost service and other services is that once someone buys your file, then they also can download the file “forever”. So you’re offering an automatic online backup of any file you sell. Another innovative feature of this service allows you to “loan” files to people.

According to the Dreamhost blog, “Any file you buy from Files Forever you can also “loan” to your friends via the service! They are then allowed to download the file as much as they want until you ask for it “back.””

You can also have other people resell your files, giving them a fixed fee for the sale. So you can store files for your own use, store files to give others access for free or you can sell your digital media. These are all functions that audio and video podcasters would probably be interested in, either for archiving files or offering premium podcast episodes.

There are fees to use the service, which for the moment is only open to Dreamhost customers. You pay a one time fee that is currently fixes at $7 per GB uploaded. And you pay transaction fees of 5% and 50 cents per sale. That seems pretty steep for folks who might want to sell 99 cent downloads. So you have to start at about $1.99 to make a decent profit off of each file sold. According to a note on the Dreamhost Control Panel, “We do our best to minimize this by combining users’ purchases and charging them only when they have enough files to make it worth while!” I’m not sure what that means, but hopefully they will ditch the 50 cent fee in favor of upping the percentage of the sale.

[tags]Social Media, Hosting, DRM, Dreamhost, Files Forever, iTunes, Libsyn[/tags]