Video sharing websites such as Youtube have been enormously successful and show substantial traffic growth and visitors. The trends are also showing that increasing amounts of people are visiting video sites, rather than Google to research information. This might be the time to launch your own site. Below we detail the information to get you started.

1. Rather than aiming at a mass market, choose a niche for your video site. I niche could include, cooking video's, car maintenance, howto's are perhaps "bloopers" and comic video's.

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 may not meet your requirements for running video site hosting. For instance you will need to check that web host has installed a software utility called ffmpeg. FFmpeg is popular software that converts video in various formats, on the fly to .flv format (or any other video format).

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