Webspace, video uploads, downloads etc (advice needed)

[Dogg Thang]

Hi folks,
As some of you may or may not know, I have a little horror short film that I made a couple of years back. It did the rounds at a few horror festivals and seemed to get a bit of interest. Well today I found out that the main mail address at my site has not been working for over a year and there was much more interest in my short film than I thought. So, rather than follow up on the 300+ mails looking to see the film, I thought it's about time I just got it uploaded to webspace and offer it to people for free download.

So, knowing almost nothing about this sort of thing, this brings up a few issues. Firstly, encoding the short. It runs at just under 15 minutes and much of it is quite dark so it won't survive serious compression - it will look nasty. Any ideas how I can get the short from dvd to a movie file or something that is nicely on that line of being easy to watch without the file size being too large? I'm not even sure how to rip from a dvd...I did it a couple of times I think but I can't honestly remember how.

Is offering a movie file the best way to do that, do you think?

Next issue is webspace. It's going to be pretty large I would have thought so I need to be able to put it up for download without too much of a space or bandwidth issue. Are there easy options for that in this day and age? I actually have a deluxe website account with surpass hosting but, man, am I having trouble navigating their site to figure out what I've got there. I think it's around 70GB monthly transfer. Would that be enough?

Thanks for any info on this!

Edit: How about a torrent? How does that work?

[Cornflakes]

Encoding:
To keep it simple, get Nero Recode 2.2 and follow this guide on doom9
make sure you choose avc later on, h264 is better for dark scenes.
Alternatively you can use the x264 method.

Upload:
Maybe usenet, just google for an upload guide.
If you manage to get the file under 100Mb, maybe use rapidshare.de,
or 250MB use megaupload.com

Btw BT(british telecom) just switch their feed to giganews or something similar ^^.

[Commander Marklar]

You could use dreamhost, grab a two-year hosting deal pre-paid up which works out to $7.95 a month. If you use 'GAMEENDINGS' as your promo code, you get another $10 off which works out to roughly ?100 all in. That's 1TB (yeah, that's correct) a month, more than enough bandwidth for you. Permanent solution this, versus the sharing stuff.

Google video is perhaps another option?