Does anybody have an opinion the best hosting formula for flash and video heavy sites, and the best way to serve content heavy with large photos, flash video and intensive flash applications? What is the key thing here: CPU speed, RAM? Answers appreciated!

I think all the specs like CPU, RAM, Cache, CPU speed play a important role here. As it a Streaming site, so the port speed will also matter in this case.

It really depends on what actual applications you will be using - a lot of flash stuff may be CPU/RAM hungry on the client side but not the server itself (it just has to stream the data) whereas something doing on the fly video conversion on the server would be CPU/RAM heavy.

Steve

Its not to handle a streaming site server. We have many of the streaming clients and provided powerful Xeon servers, but due to streaming, sometime servers seems like a shared hosting.

Streaming consumes high resources. You need to you Load Balancing technique for you website. This is what we are using for our streaming clients. And, definately you need to have a handsome budget.

Put your large content or content that is loaded often on a CDN. Such as Amazon then your content can be loaded from the nearest geographical location and take the load off the primary server, reducing the knock on effect on other items.

There are no "best formula", lots of factors have an influence on it: number of visitors, your OS config etc

Since you've uttered about flash video and intensive flash applications, the CPU and RAM play a major role in the processing and delivery of the requests.

A CDN can work well, though you may even consider a scalable cloud platform for that purpose if the visitors are from a particular geo-location. Well, if your site involves live streaming don't consider a shared platform, a dedicated server is what you'd need to achieve the best performance.

I know CDN is really good.
Live streaming demands much resources.

hi, if there any website with flash, large images and data, i would suggest you a dedicated server for that kind of website.it will be beneficial for the website owner.
Thanks

Flash is really CPU heavy but I'm guessing it runs client side and therefore not on the server but on the users computer ? So bandwidth then ram then CPU then storage. That's what I would personally recommend you look for. Maybe shared hosting with a reliable host or a low end Vps? Alien Vps have some good offers on currently.