Video Sharing Web Sites seem all the rage right now, and a quick check on Alexa reveals that traffic to the established sites is soaring. So how to get in on the action and set up your own video sharing site.

1. Firstly you’ll have to decide whether to offer a mainstream video sharing site like YouTube. Starting off small, I’d suggest going after a small niche, in order that you can rank well for that niche in the search engines. A niche might be sports, funny video’s or howto’s, such as cooking or computer maintenance.

2. You’ll need a good snappy domain name. Head over to one of the big registrars and see whats available. There are different approaches to choosing a domain. One way would be to include the keywords from your niche, such as “cooking videos.” Another is to pick a snappy, zany name that help the site go viral.

3. Choose a web host. You should consider a dedicated server as the load with video sharing websites is greater. However shared hosting or even a VPS or virtual private server should be ok to test your site, until you are getting decent traffic.

4. Normal web hosting might need the requirements for video sharing so check out web hosts, and Google for “ffmpeg hosting.” FFMpeg is a utility that powers a lot of video sharing sites as it will encode video in varying formats to flash video player format (.flv)

5. Users will probably upload their video’s in .avi or mp3 format, and your server will convert them on the fly using ffmpeg. Other software that might be required to encode and play your video’s will be ffmpeg-php, libogg