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.

Comments

Dreamhost

[epdp14]

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

Re:Dreamhost

[morari]

Dreamhost is great! I've been using them for years to host about a dozen different sites. Nothing [i]quite[/i] as big as what the posters is looking for, but they do claim "unlimited space and traffic". If nothing else, their tech support is ridiculously amazing. When you contact them, you actually get someone that you can understand and that knows exactly what they're doing... even in some of the obtuse situations I've put them in. :)

Re:Dreamhost

[0100010001010011]

I'm probably pushing 1TB of photos on DreamHost. They're maybe 98% uptime but for something like I use it for it really doesn't matter. For what I pay it's great.

Plus one of their employees wrote Ceph. (A FOSS distributed file system).

Re:Dreamhost

[epdp14]

I have around 1.5TB of photos and home movies on DH as a web-backup and to share with family without having to sign the rights over to facebook.

Re:Dreamhost

[Stuarticus]

I used Dreamhost for something similar to the requesters needs, but was informed that the 500GB did not include the storage of any "media"files and had to move to another provider at pretty short notice. Would not recommend!

Re:Dreamhost

[cayenne8]

Why not just install Apache, and expose the contents of your computer to the world directly, instead of pushing it to external servers?

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.

Re:Dreamhost

[dreemernj]

without having to sign the rights over to facebook.

And this way you can do crazy things like require a person authenticate themselves before they can see the picture vs someplace like Facebook where every picture is publicly accessible.

Re:Dreamhost

[Luckyo]

Dreamhost is cheap, but reliability and speed are not that good. We have a club that hosts its site, smallish but actively used database that fetches content from another database hourly and member email on it. During last year we had several unannounced short site outages, one mail outage that ended up losing day worth of mail randomly (small amount of mail went through, rest got lost) and one maintenance that they announced only a couple of hours before actual maintenance.

There is also an issue of speed, they do not seem to mirror outside US and their speeds to Europe are... well, bad. Takes up to ten seconds to load a text page with php script fetching content from DB (into a table). Guy who has full write access to DB for pushing some changes to it has to often wait really REALLY long for database to update his changes. I've seen up to 30 seconds for change to a single value this autumn, pretty much not usable, although that was partially script's fault for writing more then that value every time afaik,but still inexcusably slow.

It's cheap, but you get what you pay for. Considering that we don't really need reliability that bad, and beside the email loss that one time and slowness being occasionally annoying, it's a functioning system for most of us.

Re:Dreamhost

[Shifty0x88]

I'm with you cayenne8! Why pay for something that you may not need to pay for.

Also install DynDns on the server so you can always go to you server without remembering your ip address( God when I found this service I was ecstatic, no more remember IP Addresses!!!).

If you are unfamiliar with DynDns it just makes a Dns record for you on their server so when you point your ssh client or browser to yourWebServer.dyndns.org it resolves to your public ip address ex: 170.99.99.123 or whatever you are so you can access your files.

Plus is you use apache you can create a sweet web interface to your server and amaze all of your friends!

Re:Dreamhost

[SausageOfDoom]

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.

Re:Dreamhost

[neyla]

You use a public-facing app that requires authenthication, Dreamhost even has a one-click-installer for Gallery, which supports extensive access-controls.

It doesn't matter what something "is", only what it does. If you upload all your pictures to a gallery-installation on Dreamhost, they're available for download, should your local computer crash-and-burn.

WHT Forum

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ - This would be a good site to review.

Re:WHT Forum

[billcopc]

This.

If you have the patience to read reviews for a half hour or so, you will hear all the pros and cons of any given hosting company. On top of that, they often post exclusive deals in that forum which can be quite a bargain. It is *THE* go-to for hosting discussion. Very highly recommended!

Or you could go the no-brainer route and get a cheap dedicated server from a place like Leaseweb. I've been with them for years, and I think they have US-based "bargain servers" starting around $80 or so, but that's entirely self-managed, so you need to know enough to set up your own Apache/SQL stack on CentOS or Ubuntu or whatever the kids are using these days. Like I said, I've been there for 5+ years, their service used to be ass back then but now it's top-notch, and the price is hard to beat for what you're getting. Traffic is cheap there too, heck you can get 100mb unmetered for under 2 bills if you don't mind slightly boring hardware.

Re:WHT Forum

[billcopc]

In that case, he could just rent space from an actual rsync backup provider.

VPS for server, storage for storage

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a bog standard VPS to do the hosting, storage on S3/other cloud storage provider - probably the cheapest way of doing it.

Re:VPS for server, storage for storage

[InsightIn140Bytes]

Uh, transfer in and out of S3 is really costly. It's one of the reasons I didn't change my servers there. I would have for processing power and everything else, but the bandwidth is extremely costly.

Re:VPS for server, storage for storage

[Slashdot Parent]

Transfer in is currently free as a promotion, but yeah transfer out is pricey.

For what it's worth, I don't think free inbound transfer is a promotion. If it is, it sure isn't presented that way on their pricing page.

Obviously that doesn't change the fact that outbound transfer is on the expensive side.

This was not a great question

[digitalsushi]

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.

Couple of questions

[Nutria]

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?

Re:Couple of questions

[ByOhTek]

I don't know about the submitters case, but one case I'm familiar with, is one of my friends teaches Electronic Writing. The idea is that people tend to expect/use different standards in online publications (compare similar topics in a blog to other sources. They tend to expect more pictures, in particular, but paragraph separation and other factors come in. Apparently a less formal standard of writing is also allowed.

Sorry I can't give you more details, that's about all I got from her.

Re:Couple of questions

[tomhudson]

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).

Consider using a CDN

[firegate]

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.

Unlimited spaces != unlimited files

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

modwest

[jd142]

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.

If it's only for your class

[denshao2]

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.

Something is wrong here

[nine-times]

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.

initial upload

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:600 gigs storage, $5.83/month

[sandytaru]

I switched from a $15/month host to a $3/month host (Maiahost.) The previous host was unreliable, had frequent downtime, and was running on some fairly archaic web technology. (At one point, they lost ALL my data with no local backups. That was the last straw; I ran my own backups once a week but that was still a few days of SQL data totally gone.) When I switched, I've had access to instant tech support, 0 unplanned downtime so far, and a library of amazing CMS systems that they're happy to help me implement at no additional cost. Love them to bits. The marketplace for hosting is very competative now, and the overpriced unreliable ones are going to fail eventually.

Do you know ... ?

[heatseeker_around]

I assume that you know you posted your question on slashdot . So I can assume you know it is a cave full of nerds and geeks all over the place. Some are staring at you from the the ceiling, others are cowardly anonymous and invisible, some also pretend not to be nerds by referring to nerds as "they", "them", "the nerds"... hum...
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 :

• - You say, "I was hoping Slashdot could suggest a reliable hosting service for that type of project." What type of project? Define "reliable". (nerd 778537)
• - To be more specific, why are you trying to upload the entire contents of your hard drive to a web server? (nerd 778537)
• - What the heck is Electronic Writing that it needs a course separate from "regular" writing? (nerd 679911)
• - 500GB of words is 55 metric arse-loads. What are you not telling us? (nerd 679911)
• - You might have asked us what the best sports team is, frankly. (nerd 137809)

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 ?

Host yourself

[keith_nt4]

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.

Re:Bluehost or Hostmonster

[lucm]

I agree, I've been with them for years and they have a very good service. Twice I tried different hosts (more expensive), I even tried Google App commercial offering (which I hated) but I always went back to Bluehost.

Pros:
-uptime
-service
-performance
-the whole package (features, SimpleScript library, etc.)
-clear billing, no scam
-no annoying upsell campaigns (excep the Postini ad when you first access the CPanel)
-their IPs are not on spam blacklists

Cons:
-restrictions for photo/video content
-shared databases are not secured properly (you can see the other user names when you login)

A few times I sold part of my business and had to transfer the domains to a third party, and even if it was taking business away they were very helpful with this.

Why not MiracleData(tm)?

[MiracleData*Sponsor*]

Hi folks, Dan from MiracleData(tm) here! I thought I'd take advantage of Slashdot's new AskSlashdot sponsorship feature to throw in my two cents worth, and recommend to you our own line of MiracleServers(tm)! While I am the chairman and CEO of MiracleData(tm), I don't want you to think I'm biased in any way when I say - without fear of contradiction, since I now control the moderation on this thread - that MiracleData(tm) is the greatest service to mankind since the invention of modern medicine! No, that's only because it's absolutely, 100% true!

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!!!

So in conclusion, I think you can see that MiracleData(tm) is the only sensible choice here. Give us a call to get started today, and remember our motto - "If It's A Good Server, It's A Miracle"!