FFmpeg hosting--assortment of software

FFmpeg hosting is a term that is used to refer to any "assortment of software which is

available free, which helps in recording, converting and streaming a digital video or

an audio", and to those domain registrars and web hosting companies which provide

the above assortment of software to video hosting services. It is known as FFmpeg

hosting due to the usage by several video hosting services of the FFmpeg software

library in the server-side conversion of files with variously-encoded video and audio

formats into a single preferred video or audio format that is both playable from the

video hosting service and embeddable into any offsite webpage. As of 2010, the

preferred format for the presentation of converted video is the .mp4 format.

Typically, most hosting infrastructures are based on the paradigm of using a single

physical machine to host multiple hosted services, including web, database, email,

FTP and others. A single physical machine is not only a single point of failure, but

also has finite capacity for traffic, that in practice can be troublesome for a busy

website or for a website that is experiencing transient bursts in traffic.

By clustering services across multiple hardware machines, and using load balancing

you can eliminate single points of failure increasing availability of your website and

other web services beyond that of ordinary single server hosting. A single server can

require periodic reboots for software upgrades and the like, whereas in a clustered

platform you can stagger the restarts such that the service is still available whilst still

upgrading all necessary machines in the cluster.

Clustered hosting is similar to cloud hosting, in that the resources of many machines

are available for a website to utilize on demand, making scalability a large advantage

to a clustered hosting solution.