How to make a website like youtube?

Money. And, lots of it.

Well, im a website designer, if you where to fund such a website i would help you create it for 0.5% ownership. I say this, because in all honesty, you are going to need several million dollars to make a site anything like youtube.

The design its self would not be too complicated, you need a domain name, some hosting (storage) and a little web design skill.

The problem is the hosting. its going to cost you about $4000 US dollars a year to run a server, and you are going to need thousands of such servers. see, the problem is video takes up a lot of storage. a normal quality 30 minute video is likely to take up 300mb to 400mb. with a server, a standard server, you are going to have about 300gb. that will let you have maybe a thousand videos. if you take in to consideration that there are now HD videos, you can see how its going to soon get very expensive.

My suggestion, would be to set up a site, that lets people embed videos that are already on youtube and other video sites. like that you dont have to pay for the hosting of the videos, just the site, however, you wont have exclusive content either. and there are already lots of sites that do this kind of thing.

at the moment, the biggest hard drive you can get is about 3TB, so, another option would be to wait 20 or 30 years, until we have 800TB hard drives, and then you can probably make something like it for a reasonable amount of money.

Linux, Apache, PHP, and MySQL. (a.k.a. LAMP)

If you know how to program, you won’t need any money at all, just a lot of time. A year or so of coding on weekends and evenings.

If you don’t know how to program, then, yeah, you’ll need a boatload of money.

You can purchase a turkey software for this kind of website at a very low price. You’d still have to worry about operations and making your site popular. Traffic is everything!

You’ll need LOTS of programming experience with a server-side language (PHP, Java, C), client-side (HTML, Javascript), and possibly flash to build the video player, though with HTML5 video being more common you could simply add a few HTML tags to the page or use something like SublimeVideo to the page to get something to play. Also, experience with online community-building would most likely be needed to lift the site from the dark once it’s built.

I won’t go over the hosting costs since @poisonedantidote‘s post covers it pretty well, but it will cost an arm and a half each month if you host your own videos. The only reason someone would post a video on your site is if it offered something unique to all other video sites. Some ideas could be the ability to add comments on the video player at certain timestamps (much like SoundCloud does with audio), HTML5 embedding, or simply a clean, minimalistic design.

Ignoring the hosting costs, I think you should at least attempt it. Of course you need the programming experience, but it would be a great exercise for many of your skills. If you ever have any ideas about this or another site, feel free to ask here. I’ll lead you through the actions to turn it into a live site (or nice experiment).

Well, you don’t really need knowledge of PHP; Java; etc. You can just use an open-source script (free software), or a commercial one, and you need web hosting + a domain, as @poisonedantidote said earlier. But, it’s just a pain to run a site like that, and, from a realistic point of view: Do you really think your site can succeed against sites like YouTube, etc. that have multi-million companies standing behind them?

Well i am now trying to test my website. I hope i can launch before new year.
Basically its just a trial. Now i know how much it’ll cost so with my current budget, i can only keep the website alive for a month (T_T) so it will be interesting see what it can do in a month.

Hell ya my website can compete easily with youtube. To be honest it really can compete with youtube. I tried a LAN version of it on school it was a straight hit. Thats why i want to share it with the people around the world.

Let us know when you have a live link!

@Vortico yeah ill let you know.
its gonna be a nice experiment and experience
though the website may look crappy were trying to make it as clean as possible.