With millions of downloads, Joomla is one of the top three CMS platforms, owning 75% of the CMS market. Joomla is open-source, so there are thousands of extensions webmasters can use to add media-rich content without incurring additional charges. Videos are a leading marketing tool, for example, but word to the wise before installing Joomla. If you want your apps to operate smoothly and seamlessly, quality Joomla hosting is needed to support quality services and streaming.
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)
Whether you’re hosting several small videos or a few large videos, the amount of bandwidth needed to support streaming is probably more than a standard host has to offer. Moving video to a CDN is one way to guarantee performance and bandwidth even during high traffic times.
CDNs have what a typical server does not: geo-caching. Instead of relying on one physical machine’s resources, CDNs pull video content from several servers geo-targeted to the viewer’s location. In addition to delivering video from servers closest to the viewer, caching stores those videos in server memory. Delivering video from server memory is always faster, because the server doesn’t need to “look up” the video’s location and process it for delivery. It’s always in memory ready to run, similar to having a file open at all times, so you can quickly glance at it.
Avoid Free Hosting Options
The “free” aspect is hard to avoid and tempting for site owners on a budget, but it’s a poor option for serious businesses. Avoid hosting content on your own servers, especially if those servers are shared with other users. Shared hosting is cheap, but fast video performance requires servers capable of handling video demands. When the site owner opts for shared hosting, there could be hundreds of others sites hosted on the same server. If these sites deliver video as well, bandwidth usage is likely maxed out.
Avoid Using Free Platforms
This means using YouTube and Vimeo are not an option. These sites are great for personal videos or linking to someone else’s media, but the delivery is typically slow, and the look of these videos harms the professional look of the site. YouTube and Vimeo brand the companies’ streams with ads and marketing. The webmaster is unable to control these aspects, and ads are never good for viewers.
Vimeo’s license restricts commercial use, so webmasters are unable to customize videos. While these video options are convenient and compatible with any device, they should only be used for promotional videos and left off the main site.
Scale Costs with Video Bandwidth Needs
As video bandwidth increases, so will your hosting requirements. The bandwidth purchased for a site should be slightly more than what is needed. This means that there’s room for growth without paying too much for massive amounts of bandwidth. With cloud hosting, this scaling can be done through the management dashboard. What’s great about cloud hosting is that bandwidth can also be scaled up or down. When slower seasonal traffic doesn’t require as much bandwidth, scale down to save some money. When the busy season returns, scale back up.
Joomla site owners can enjoy the ease at which videos are added to a site, but the backbone for these videos is the host. Find a host that offers standard CDN cloud quality and keep the site’s professional video quality.
This is a guest post by Jennifer Marsh. Jennifer is a software developer, programmer and technology writer and occasionally blogs for open cloud company Rackspace Hosting.
