You spend time and money in building your online radio show website. You have a great player software to play your audio and music. But you wish to have a way to engage those listeners that like what you have to offer. The best way is using a chat-room next to your live audio stream. This will allow you to easily talk to your listeners, get their remarks, feedbacks and change the playlist if needed.
Chat rooms are a great way to create a live vibrant community.
It becomes very easy this days to add one to a website. There are many options in the market. Now, in essence, you will need to choose between 2 type of chats and once decided this will make pinpointing your preferred vendor easier.
- Type 1 : Install a chat room software on your server .
- Type 2 : Add a hosted chat room where you do not need to install anything on your servers.
The pros and cons of each choice are detailed below.
Chat Room Service
With chat service, you add a small piece of code to your HTML page (snippet).
And you are done. All is being taken care of.
PROS
- Easy to add
- Create several chats with a click.
- No upgrades are needed, all is being done by the chat room service providers.
- No servers to maintain.
- No extra man power is needed.
- No performance issues when the server is loaded with users.
- Create many chats as you like with a click.
- You can design your own chat room style.
CONS
- Monthly subscription to cover maintenance costs and the servers and bandwidth costs.
Installed Chat Room Software
A software is something you buy and install on your shared server or on your dedicated server.
PROS
- One time payment normally for one chat.
CONS
- Require installation. Not always easy.
- If installed on the same server as your web-server, it might cause slowness to the whole site in case the chat is loaded.
- If you use a shared hosting, you probably will not be able to install a chat as hosting companies avoid this kind of potential server load.
- You will need to upgrade your server when a new chat/feature will be released.
- You should keep your server maintained.
- Make sure you have the extra man power to deal/test it.
- Might cause performance issues on your server that might result in the upgrade to your server.
- You may create only one chat room.
To sum it up, the logical choice would be to install a hosted chat room (meaning using a chat service) and not install a software as the world find the cloud hosted services as the future and in the long term it saves a lot of money (and frustrations).