Why would you have problems finding a web host that supports FFmpeg? Well, first let us tackle what FFmpeg is.
It is a server side software library that concerts video and audio files into a preferred audio or video format to play them or embed them from a web site. YouTube is a good example of this type of technology at work. In turn, FFmpeg hosting is a term used to cover the assortment of FFmpeg and other server side technologies that help with converting digital video or audio.
So let’s say you go to your web host and tell them you want to start up a YouTube clone. While there are many web hosts out there that can host your normal web site, only a small amount of web hosts will be willing to accommodate your needs for your YouTube clone script.
The reason this is so, is that these types of scripts can be unfriendly to the server.
They use up a lot of disk space for storing the videos. They use a lot of bandwidth, with the embedding and streaming of the videos too. Then count in the CPU and RAM usage with converting the videos from one format to another on the server side and you have a real big mess.
The solution, in most situations, is to turn towards Virtual Private Servers (VPS) or dedicated hosting accounts. Right now, if you want to be any kind of success, shared hosting can not support YouTube clone scripts and everything you need from what was earlier defined as a FFmpeg hosting.
