AHosting Blog

Year: 2013

  • Take Control of Video Comments

    If you’re a regular YouTube user and even if you’re not, you have probably noticed the recent comments controversy. Google, in an effort to sanitize the comments that appear beneath videos and integrate YouTube with their social networking platform, implemented significant changes to the YouTube comment system. YouTube users, who rely on comments to communicate with their audiences and get feedback, were less than happy about the changes.

    While YouTube comments have become infamous for their low quality and there was definitely an argument to be made for improving them, YouTube users were disgruntled about many aspects of the modifications, including being forced to use Google Plus and give up their anonymous identities,  and the confusing and unpredictable comment ordering. They were particularly dissatisfied with the way YouTube now handles spam. So, while it was fair to argue that YouTube comments needed improvement, the specific implementation that Google chose has resulted in an unsatisfactory experience for video sharers and for their audiences. (more…)

  • AHosting Announces Optimized Joomla Hosting Platform

    Hudson, FL, November 11, 2013 – AHosting, a provider of optimized CMS hosting, has announced the introduction of a platform developed to provide an optimal hosting environment for the Joomla content management system. AHosting’s Joomla hosting packages include one-click installation, unlimited storage and bandwidth, and daily or weekly site backups.

    Joomla is a popular open source content management framework with core features that make it ideal for building sites of all types and versatile extensibility that empowers users to create new functionality and a unique experience. Out of the box, Joomla includes sophisticated user management with authentication supporting multiple protocols, an advanced media manager, and a powerful three-tiered content management system.

    Joomla isn’t limited to its core features. It has a thriving community that has developed many thousands of extensions that can be used to add almost any feature imaginable. (more…)

  • AHosting Announces New Optimized WordPress Hosting Platform

    Hudson, FL, October 22, 2013 – AHosting, a provider of premium web hosting, has announced the introduction of a new optimized hosting platform for WordPress, the world’s most popular content management system. AHosting’s WordPress hosting packages include unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, and daily or weekly site backups.

    WordPress is used by over 20% of the world’s websites and has more active deployments than any other content management system. In the ten years that it has been under active development, WordPress has come to embody the perfect combination of an uncomplicated user experience with the flexibility and configurability that professional web developers demand. (more…)

  • Video Sharing Sites For Educators

    The Internet has had a huge impact on many areas of the educational world. Whether you teach grade school, post-docs, or anyone in-between, you’ll be expected to take account of new technologies in your teaching practice. If educators are to effectively communicate with their students, they have to adopt the channels that are natural to the digitally native millennial generation. That includes blogs, social networks, and increasingly, video.

    While it may be daunting for educators to consider video production and sharing as part of their teaching, it’s not as complex as it might seem. The combination of live action, screencasts, presentations, and audio that video makes possible provide a powerful educational tool for teachers. (more…)

  • 6 Tools For Creating Awesome Educational Screencasts

    If you want to create an educational video sharing site, screencasts are an essential component. Since video has become so much more popular and affordable, many content creators are turning from the traditional text tutorial with screenshots to the more information rich screencasting format. If your educational content revolves around a computer, then you really need to be making screencasts to obtain the maximum levels of engagement and sharing.

    Put simply, a screencast is a video recording of all or some part of your screen along with audio narration, screen captions, and sometimes a music soundtrack. In the old days, it was a pain to make a high-quality screencast, but both software and hardware has improved to the point where it’s fairly straightforward with the right tools. (more…)

  • Choosing Reliable FFmpeg Hosting

    FFmpeg hosting clients have very specific needs, and those needs are not always met by standard shared hosting providers. To offer the best possible experience to a site’s users, it’s necessary to ensure that the hosting platform that webmasters choose for their site offers capabilities that are tailored to the unique requirements of video and audio sharing platforms.

    To help clients make the best choice for their site, we’re going to have a look at the services and infrastructure that they can expect from a high-quality FFmpeg hosting company.

    Performance

    Users of video sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo have come to expect a level of user experience that is not easy to replicate for a hosting company without the same enormous resources as a company like Google. To build a robust and loyal community of sharers, it’s necessary to provide very fast video conversion and streaming. No one like to wait for hours while their videos are uploaded and encoded, so high performance servers with plenty of processing power and bandwidth are essential. (more…)

  • SEO Tips For Video Sharing Sites

    Video sharing sites pose a particular set of problems for search engine optimization. Google’s crawlers can’t interpret video content and so rely on the textual content and markup that surrounds the videos to get an idea of the terms for which videos should be ranked. It’s likely that Google is going to get better at interpreting video content in the future — they’re certainly working on artificial intelligence algorithms that recognize the subject of moving images and that can pull textual transcriptions out of videos — but the technology in its current form is rudimentary, and so owners of video sharing sites should make sure to optimize the pages their videos appear on properly.

    Great Content

    At the core of any SEO strategy is the creation of high-quality content that encourages viewers to post links to the site. The better the content, the more likely it is to garner the back links and social shares that will help a site to rank in the SERPs. (more…)

  • AHosting Announces New $4 FFmpeg Hosting Plans

    Hudson, FL, September 11, 2013 – AHosting, a leading provider of premium web hosting, has announced the introduction of low-cost optimized FFmpeg hosting. The new plans represent a comprehensive solution for the deployment of advanced video sharing and streaming sites and include 35GB of storage, 1TB of bandwidth, and the cPanel control panel.

    Video is fast surpassing the written word as the primary medium of communication on the web. The almost ubiquitous presence of low-cost video cameras has lead to an enormous increase in the creation of video by ordinary people and an accompanying rise in the need for sites tailored specifically for the sharing of video and audio content. Everyone is aware of the success of YouTube and Vimeo, but those platforms fail to address the video sharing needs of niche communities. (more…)

  • Hosting Your Own Videos Is Better For Business Than Using YouTube. Here’s Why.

    Video is fast becoming the lifeblood of online marketing, branding, and communication. Done properly, it’s an incredibly effective medium for increasing awareness, engagement, and generating traffic. However, many businesses and webmasters shoot themselves in the foot by using third-party video hosting services like YouTube and Vimeo. While there are clear advantages to using YouTube in some cases, including increased exposure, the fact that your content is living on someone else’s site can limits the sort of content you can publish and what you can do with it.

    The alternative is self-hosting a video sharing site that bestows many of the same benefits as using YouTube, while ensuring that you remain firmly in control of your content. So, why should you be using a self-hosted video sharing site rather than YouTube and its competitors? (more…)

  • FFmpeg Hosting: Build Audiences With A Video Sharing Website

    Video sharing sites are hugely popular. From YouTube and Vimeo to Twitter’s short video sharing social network Vine, video is fast becoming the favored medium of many online creatives. The increasing prevalence of smartphone cameras capable of recording high quality video and immediately uploading them to the Internet creates an enormous volume of video data.

    That popularity creates an opportunity for web entrepreneurs to build sites that provide a space for the video sharing requirements of niche markets and communities. Back in the day, those groups were catered to by forums, but, in the coming years, video sharing and the communities that grow around them will become increasingly important. (more…)