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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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 ?

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).