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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.
Get a bog standard VPS to do the hosting, storage on S3/other cloud storage provider - probably the cheapest way of doing it.
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
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.
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.
If your ISP gives you grief about a server on your account (I hear that some do)....switch to a business account....it isn't that much more and you can run all the servers you want, no caps, no extra charges. Mines only about $69/mo with Cox Business cable.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
From the summary ("I'm trying to upload the entire contents of my computer to a webserver that will preserve the directory structure") it's some stupid "performance art".
500 gigabytes (5 terabits). Assuming a consumer 10mb down/1mb uplink, it would take (not counting protocol overhead) 1,389 hours (58 days) for the initial upload, by which time we can assume at least some of the data has changed.
Not to mention that if the author has a non-free OS or applications on that computer, they'll be violating plenty of copyrights.
Bottom line: AGH (Ain't Gonna Happen).
The obvious corollary is that it will take a month to upload all of the files to the server anyway.
Am I missing something here - how does uploading the 500GB contents of your hard drive to a web server qualify as an art project for an electronic writing class?
Frankly this sounds like an insane and poorly-conceived idea, but unless the OP is uploading 500GB of ripped films or porn, nobody is going to bother trying to download all of it, so if it's just to tick a box as part of a school project, I would have thought hosting it on the end of a 2Mbps connection will be a feature.