website newbie questions

[Nicholi Brossia]

I'm currently in the process of designing my own website to feature my skits and short films. This will mainly be a hobby site that will stay fairly small... unless something wild happens. My plan is to feature about 5 videos that will rotate in and out, and figure that will take up at least 200Mb after providing the different formats and bandwidths. My questions are about web service/hosting.

Storage space is easy to figure out, but does anyone have any advice on allotted file transfer?

Is streaming a good idea? And if so, how does that count toward the file transfer?

How reliable are the free tracking services that come with having the site hosted?

Does anyone have advice on specific, reliable hosting companies? Is it best to use a company in my area?

I have a cable modem and a nice G4 Mac, would it be worth it to host the site myself, considering that computer is also my video editor?

I do have a basic knowledge of maintaining a website and plan to spend quite a bit of time marketing. However, I'd like to get as much information/advice as I can before jumping into this.

Thanks in advance.

[Rob Lohman]

I would not host yourself, especially not on a machine you use
for other things (for reasons of performance and especially
security!!). Also your internet provider is probably not to keen
on that either.

Streaming requires a special serverside application which your
hosting party will probably not have running. If you distribute
in QuickTime (or some other formats) it will do semi-streaming
(see our Lady X site at www.ladyxfilms.com for an example).

Our Lady X episodes are around 6 - 7 minutes in time and around
35 mb. So this should give you room for at least 5 minutes if you
use a similar compression.