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Webhosting For A Large Art Project?
First time accepted submitter heleneleh writes "I'm in a class at school on Electronic Writing and for my final project I'm trying to upload the entire contents of my computer to a webserver that will preserve the directory structure (I plan on using rsync so that it is continually updated as my files change). I need about 500 GB of space, and I'm willing to spend some money, so I was hoping Slashdot could suggest a reliable hosting service for that type of project. Traffic shouldn't be too high, but the storage space and ssh access are key. If there's another way to do this, I'd love to know about it."
I've noticed a lot of VPS providers charge almost nothing for processor time and RAM, but disk is still pretty expensive.
I use dream host... "unlimited space and traffic" they really mean don't go crazy and try to host a google.com mirror off of it. Its pretty cheap, I pay $8 a month. You can run cron jobs, mysql databases, etc. I've been happy with it. I know it is karma/referral whoring but you can use my referral code and get a free domain registration: FOLLOWTHEHORIZON (if you already have a domain just use DREAMBUCKS for $50 off your first year). http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?303747
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ - This would be a good site to review.
Get a bog standard VPS to do the hosting, storage on S3/other cloud storage provider - probably the cheapest way of doing it.
http://www.bluehost.com/
http://www.hostmonster.com/
Unlimited space and SSH Access enabled. Low price. I'm use to backup with rsync my files.
Cons:
The server can to be with high load.
Greetings from Paraguay
NICOLAS PEREYRA MOLINAS http://npereyra.ywork.net
Before they made the split, you could have signed up for the 10-year deal for as low as $1.67/month.
You might have asked us what the best sports team is, frankly.
I want to see some Ask Slashdot questions with some depth. The focus on breadth is eating Pez candies day after day, and my teeth are rotten and I want a meal.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
a) What the heck is Electronic Writing that it needs a course separate from "regular" writing?
b) 500GB of words is 55 metric arse-loads. What are you not telling us?
Anyway, why aren't you backing the data up to a local USB drive?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
... Go Daddy!
No, duh, colocate a dedicated server or even rent a dedicated server for next to nothing.
...then I took an arrow to the knee.
You should consider using a Cloud CDN like Rackspace CloudFiles or Amazon S3. They're designed purely for cheap, efficient and fast storage and delivery. While you can't SSH into one, you can certainly set up rsync without incident and the data can be called from a site hosted anywhere.
"Make it idiot proof, and someone will make a better idiot."
I've used Techark for years ( http://www.techark.com/ ). They've been reliable. Nice folks too.
What will "entire contents" include? Will this art project be publicly accessible? If you are planning to upload files from your hard drive including program files you did not create (e.g. windows or program files folders), you may be inviting some unexpected attention due to copyright issues.
Everyone has their own hosting provider that they prefer. Mine is HostMonster. Hard to argue with unlimited space and bandwidth. Haven't had any issues with uptime in the year I've been hosting with them. They allow SSH access to their hosts (but you have to provide an image of a your drivers license/state ID). Haven't tried to rsync to my server, but then again, I've never had issues using rsync provided I was doing it over ssh (e.g. `rsyc -a -v -e 'ssh -l username' /local/dir hostname:/remote/dir` #going by memory here)
At current VPS prices you'd bleed yourself through the nose for enough disk space. The first VPS plan from Linode with that much disk space is $480 a month, whereas you can get a Softlayer dedicated server with a 500GB drive for ~$200 a month.
If it supports directory hierarchy preservation (haven't tried), the cheapest alternative is Amazon S3, which is something like $70 a month for 500GB ($0.14/GB) of space, and another $20 or so per month for an EC2 instance to serve it from. There's at least one FUSE implementation that *should* let you rsync to it as well.
Many hosting services who offer "unlimited space" have other limitations you need to know about so you don't find out in the middle of transferring files that you can't do what you want to do. There are limitations on the number of inodes you can store, which for your purposes would mean the number of files you can store. So if the limit is, for instance, 50,000, then after you have uploaded that many files, you won't be able to upload any more no matter how much space you have left. The other limit I have run into is a daily limit on number of ftp file transfer which I ran into once. The limit on my hosting account was 2000 and once I reached that limit, I got locked out until I contacted tech support. Additionally, read the TOS because they might prohibit using the space to store files for archiving purposes.
I've been very happy with http://www.modwest.com over the last 10+ years. Their basic plan is $7/month, but have more expensive plans if you need it. They have unlimited(within reason of course) because they know that only a small percentage of users come close to any limits they would set.
I would host it at home. If it's only for a professor to see, you should not be getting a lot of traffic. Just keep it on a machine that is separate from anything important.
a class to rip people off and take more classes just to drive costs up and make the 4 year degree take 5 years to complete.
I don't mean to be rude, but it seems like you may be approaching this the wrong way. What are you actually doing and why? Why are you looking a VPS providers? You say, "I was hoping Slashdot could suggest a reliable hosting service for that type of project." What type of project? Define "reliable".
To be more specific, why are you trying to upload the entire contents of your hard drive to a web server? Like, if this is a writing project, do you care about copying your program/system files, and if so, why? Why a web server? Is it going to be accessed by someone else? If so, who needs to access it, and where are those people located relative to you (e.g. are they on the same network?)?
If you just need 500 GB of web space, there are lots of shared hosting companies that will provide that much space for less than $10 per month. It will be reliable enough for a lot of purposes. However, not knowing what you're trying to do, I don't know if you're doing something completely silly.
If it's not high traffic, your ISP will not call TOS violation, and with speeds nowadays, high traffic means pretty high so it depends, you'd have to get the details that are local to your area.
But I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this, or maybe i just didn't read it... but what you do is register a domain and point it at your home IP, set up a web server at home, open port 80 on your router. There are a million factors to consider here, but one less obvious one is you are probably not a high profile target, so default security will probably suffice, just don't use weak or non-existent passwords.
http://www.backblaze.com/ - I always wanted to build one of those 200TB units for $8k too
can't answer his/her own question? That doesn't compute.
You realize of course that even with reasonably good upload speeds (> 5Mb) its going to take over a solid week to upload 500GB and your ISP will probably cut you off for abusing the system. For that much data you need a service with provisions to handle you sending a disk, so all you do over the internet is deltas.
You should get a dedicated server or a VPS for that kinf of space.
Do you have an idea of your bandwidth requirement
www.Gogax.com
I've noticed a lot of VPS providers charge almost nothing for processor time and RAM, but disk is still pretty expensive.
A cheap VPS provider will have "fair use" policies, officially or otherwise (in fact any VPS provider, though good ones are more likely to have well documented policies so you know what standard you are to be judged against). If your VM uses too much CPU time you will find it disabled without warning until you beg to have it turned back on again. The same goes for if you create a lot of I/O activity (i.e. any heavy database work).
You don't have to break your quotas either: I've have a cheap VPS provider cut me off for "to much bandwidth use in a day" when the amount of bandwidth used in the the day in questino was noticably less than "the amount I was supposed to be allowed in a month" divided by 31.
Also, the cheaper the offer the more chance there is that the host machiens will be massively oversold, so you have so many other VMs on the host your's is on that there is so much competition for I/O bandwidth that any disk operation will take much longer than you'd expect to complete. A cheap provider might have tens of VMs all using the one single spinning-metal based SATA drive.
I still have a couple of cheap VPSs that I use for various bits and bobs so if you find reasonable ones all can be fine - they certainly have thier place but be aware of the possible problems. I never have anything hosted on just one of them, so if one goes down or slows to a crawl all I have to do is switch some DNS entries and another takes over. Also, if looking ay OpenVZ never judge a VPS by its "burstable" memory allocation. If you need the memory you need the memory. A fair proportion of the not-the-cheapest-of-the-cheap hosts have stopped offering burstable memory. (swap on Xen is different as you can always allocate the full amount if you need to, but with OpenVZ with burst enabled you don't know until you try which makes some things fall over regularly - apparently Java based apps of any significant size are generaly not happy in such situations for instance, and I've seen rtorrent fall over when there is a suddern glut of incoming data and it hsan't been told to artificially reign in its memory use)
http://www.webhosttingtalk.com/ is a good place to look for hosting information generally, and http://www.lowendbox.com/ is a useful resource if you are looking at the lowest end of the market without wanting to consider shared hosting. If you don't mind signing up for 6 or more months rather than a rolling monthly contract you might find so very reasonable dedicated server offers like those at http://www.kimsufi.co.uk/ (as with a cheap VPS, consider what options you lose by giong cheap such as support and SLAs), again http://www.webhosttingtalk.com/ is a good place to look for offers and discussion. Amazon's free tier (http://aws.amazon.com/free/) may also be worth looking at - you may find that much more stable and less over-sold than a cheap VPS.
Unlimited GB of Storage
Unlimited GB of Transfer
http://www.startlogic.com/
But all of them have something in common: they need SPECIFICS, they need to know EVERYTHING, they are paranoiac, they are whiners and they hate non-sense !
Examples :
Do you really expected to get any valuable answers with your non-specific question ? yeah... be sorry.
To answer to your question anyway, I need to know what kind of movies are you trying to upload illegally ?
VPS won't be good enough for your needs - most VPSes share the disk space (a raid 5 is shared between 8-16 vps machines so they can't give you lots of space).
Talk to various companies advertising budget servers on Web Hosting Talk forums.
You should be able to rent an Atom based server or an older generation server they wouldn't otherwise be able to rent for about 40-50$ a month and some of the companies will even accept to physically mail them a hard drive and install it in your server for a few extra dollars a month.
These guys are supposed to be the cheapest in dollars-for-gigs, don't know if anyone's overtaken them. They also claim to offer true encryption, in which only the user has the key.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
For 500GB you are looking at 46.50 or $70 a month for storage alone. I'd think the transfer costs (HTTP traffic) would be pennies based on the traffic patterns described.
You won't be able to use rsync ... but I'd guess there are solutions our there that allow mirror like functionality you describe.
Enterhost, been using them for over 8 years. Great service and a lot of bandwidth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
Based on the description I don't see why hosting it yourself isn't an option. If you literally have 500 gigs of data get two 1TB drives and build a NAS with the two drives mirrored. For OS you could use either a Linux server with LVM/RAID or a FreeNAS set up with ZFS. You could even virtualize it if you wanted to get fancy (easy to switch physical hardware used if nothing else). Open a port on your router and hand out the IP or setup a DynDNS sort of deal for others to access. You also want a separate USB hard drive to back the data up.
For the amount of money it would take to host all this data the Linux/FreeNAS solution would be much, much cheaper (less than $400US). Also, ridiculously easy to setup an SSH daemon on linux/FrreeBSD.
You sound like you're at some kind of college or university so I assume it wouldn't be too difficult to bribe a local computer scientist with mountain due and pizza to help you out as needed.
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
I know I sound paranoid, but to me it sounds like the submitter is trying to monitor the comings-and-goings of someone else's computer.
Glad I could help.
I've been using Pair Networks for about 15 years. They have the tools and space you need, and you can exactly mirror your present directory structure. It's either shared hosting (some 'dangerous' tools are limited) or your can lease a server. They have high reliability, near zero downtime, a software/hardware maintenance schedule (no surprises). It's FreeBSD Unix and they won't hold your hand with automated tools, so you're on your own.
I think this should be EXACTLY what you're looking for: http://www.kimsufi.co.uk/ I've personally had a server with them for about 2 years with no major issues. For the money, it's phenomenal value.
Also, Pair is amenable to special circumstances, such as high storage / low volume, nonprofits, etc. Use their homepage as a guide, and then email to ask. They answer.
InMotionHosting offers tons of disk space for a very low price.
I and other people who used to use them highly do not recommend them
Start with these : http://blog.sucuri.net/2011/09/mass-compromise-at-inmotionhosting-com.html
http://thehackernews.com/2011/09/inmotion-hosting-server-and-trinity-fm.html
They messed up the cleanup, damaging sites that had already cleaned up by themselves.
Last but not least: http://www.windows8update.com/2011/11/17/top-10-reasons-that-i-dont-use-inmotion-hosting-for-my-website-and-business/
If bandwidth isn't important, why not just put the server on your local machine?
Just brilliant, ask a vague question and then walk away. Don't answer anyone's questions. What a way to waste everyone's time. Thanks a lot, "heleneleh".
Talk with your professor first about having the University host it. Your school will have the infrastrure to host this themselves. They may have dedicated space for students. You may need to get an exception to host that much data. This is what your tuition should be paying for.
www.elitter.net obvisouly rools all. Command line access is teh rock!
Based on what you have indicated:
- priority is on space/storage
- priority on reliability of storage
- will not be alot of cpu or bandwidth usage
- you already have the information on your computer's hard drive
Suggested solution:
- get a dyndns account and use that to point to your home, so people can find it. Or just have a script that auto-updates a web page link.
- have the storage on a local Frys special computer or a NAS unit with mirroring of 2 drives.
- give it an assigned ip address either via dhcp or hard coded and port forward from the outside
take your project to school to demonstrate it, don't put (and keep) a copy of your entire hdd online. that's just pointless.
hosting that much data for a one-off project not intended to remain online is a lot of wasted bits transferred and a lot of wasted time/effort.
also consider upload times for 500gb data....
384k upstream = 126 days, 10m upstream = 5 days
might be able to half those using a transfer scheme with compression, but still, that's a hell of a long time.
(and don't forget about any usage caps enforced by your isp)
You can just use Amazon S3 Storage. .10 per GB would mean $50 per month for 500 GB.
If you use EC2 for a simple virtual server you can mount the S3 volume onto your virtual server.
If you are like me and prefer rackspace virtual servers, then you can still mount the S3 volume with something like jungle disk.
You can then use something like Jungledisk to mount it as a volume on both machines, server and source machine.
Rackspace has basic virtual servers for like $10 a month.
So $10 for basic virtual server. $50 for 50 GB of disk storage on S3, plus $5 a month for jungle disk.
$65. Is that within your budget for a short term project?
Jungle disk is not required to make it work, but its only $5, and can make it simpler to mount the volume. If you use a virtual server on amazon EC2 you can actually just mount the 500GB volume.
I use this place and they are unlimited everything with free ssh and unlimited space and bandwidth. www.tmdhosting.com it cost $3.85 a month and it comes with a free domain name also. Hope this helps. I never had my site go down in 2 years.
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Now, just to give you an example, how much would you pay for our entry-level MiracleLite(tm) server? It features 64 cores, 512 GB of RAM and over 100 terabytes of disk space! Sounds perfect for your little art project, right? Well, don't answer that price question yet, because a box like that needs a fat pipe to keep it happy, and that's why we're pairing our MiracleLite(tm) server with your own dedicated, unmetered OC-96 line! NOW how much would you pay? Got a number? Good! Now, what if I told you you could have that server and connection for....$1.79 PER YEAR! You'd say that's insane, right? And you'd be RIGHT - it IS insane, because we're INSANE for low prices here at MiracleData!!!1!!11!!!
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The Amazon EC/AWS has a lot of options. You can start hosting at little cost and nearly unlimited scaling at no infrastructure cost.
AWS Cloudfront should handle any peak you can produce (as long as you dont do your thing right before christmas....) and the pricing seems ok.
Don't bother with a VPS for this sort of thing. Just buy a dedicated server. You can get one for fairly cheap compared to the specs on a VPS when you want to go that high with HDD space. A good service for this is serverpronto.com.
It's been a long long time that I haven't seen any host asking for a SETUP FEE for a VPS. That's a sign that they must be doing the setup manually, which means you should avoid them (you want to be able to reinstall your OS yourself, that's one of the very basic features any decent host will have).
Note: I posted this on WHT but wanted to fish for replies here.
.torrent files, and due to the adult nature of the work I can't just tie into YouTube; I'll need an alternative.
Hi folks, I'm new to hosting with HostGator VPS but not so new to linux or hosting my own site, but I'm wanting to do something I've never done before, offer premium content! I would like to do this using as much of the infrastructure HostGator provides (application installs, subscription/CC integration, etc) as possible instead of trying to piece together a bunch of different products.
The main client site needs to be able to present articles, individual and galleries of videos (and pics), and some wiki articles embedded in the front end. The front end has to support different subscriptions or one time payments for membership levels. The back end needs to support wiki style collaboration on articles, fiction stories, storyboard drawings, and even videos if possible for an internet connected team of movie makers. The ability to stream live video is also on my wish list.
So far I am torn between WordPress and Joomla for the front end, as both seem like they can handle subscription/paid content, but I'm not sold on either. It also looks like if I want Single Sign On I'll have to use MediaWiki, even though I am not convinced it would be the best collaboration platform for movie making. Not sure what AcceptSafe integrates with but I'd sign up if its easiest to get working.
What are people using for distributing videos or large files? Since HostGator doesn't allow
Thanks in advance for any suggestions!
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
http://www.lowendbox.com/
Slashdot = Sarcasm
Leave all of the files on your computer - download the Opera browser and use the Opera Unite feature to share all of the artwork right from your computer. If the audience is small and the load is not an issue and you have a good DSL connection - this might be the easiest way to do it. Opera Unite will give you a URL to share and you can password protect the content also. Greg
Google is your friend
And it would seem that any standard FTP client from the last 15-20 years will do exactly what you want as far as uploading your files while preserving the directory structure.
Hi, I'm an admin for a group called yazili sorulari and we'd love to have this added to the group!