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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.
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ - This would be a good site to review.
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.
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
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."
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. :)
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
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).
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.
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.
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.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
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.........
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 ?
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.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
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.