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Suggestions For Music Hosting?
First time accepted submitter achbed writes "In conjunction with a friend of mine, I'm operating a small(ish) site that contains a large quantity of music (mp3/ogg) that we pay streaming licenses for. The site currently has about 35GB of files, and pulls down an average of about 3TB a month of bandwidth — and we're just getting started. We've been unable to find any hosting packages out there that are not of the 'unlimited' variety (meaning they can kick us at any time because we're using too much) that are not costing an insane amount of money. Our current 'main page' host charges about $0.50/GB/mo, which for this much data equates to $500 a month per TB. As we are expecting growth, this is quickly going to become a major problem, as were doing this out of our own pockets (that are not that deep). Does anyone have good leads on businesses that provide significant bandwidth (5-10TB/month) for inexpensive money? Or are we going to have to accept a price in the thousands per month to run this kind of site, with 'going viral' providing a significant risk to our pockets?"
$500 for what works out to under 5Mbps (95th pecentile mojo) seems a bit steep. These guys want to enter the 20+Mbps realm; I've done some high bandwidth hosting before, but it seems like you enter a different world when you need more than 10Mbps.
achbed continues: "We've looked into some of the major CDNs as well. Either they do not 'support streaming' (CloudFlare), or cost thousands for what we're needing."
Invest in your own servers (about US$ 5-8K) and then you'll find a world of options opening up to you as you look for colocation companies. We're on EGI Hosting which costs around $700 a month for an 95%tile 100Mbps ( on a 1Gbps connect ) pipe.
But nobody wants to pay.
Youtube.com
There are enough hostings like Singlehop that provide 10-15TB/mo per server for a few hundred dollars.
So Slashdot can go hammer your servers! :) Kidding..
Seriously, don't let us know, you will be in for $$$$
How much are you willing to spend per month? In Montreal, it is possible to have a 10Mbps unlimited fiber for about $1300 per month. You simply need to rent a space in a data center afterward.
How about Amazon EC2? $0.12 per GB, once you hit 10TB it drops to $0.09 per GB. (this doesn't include server and storage costs)
just use an iframe with youtube lol you dont really seam that big to worry
but seriosly $0.50 a gig for 5-10tb your being had! You can get a dedicated server with 10mbps connection and 10tb for $99 a month.
I recommend going down the VPS route.
There are reputable, stable companies out there that won't flake out, ie. BuyVM (http://buyvm.net).
For 25$ a month, you get 70GB disk space, 4TB bandwidth, its on a gigE link (I just pulled at 379.2mbit/s from cachefly), and I suffered an hour of downtime when they were physically moving datacenters a few months back, other than that, none at all.
I run a lot of little hosting projects all on VPSes, and I think my aggregate bandwidth usage is around 9TB a month, and I never really run into issues (I've actually gotten two 2TB+/mo boxes from different companies and tested how much bandwidth I can use, never got complains).
You can also research alternatives on lowendbox.com. You won't find cheap tier 1 bandwidth, but you will easily find cheap bandwidth.
OMG NO!
GoDaddy is a nightmare -- both in the quality of the hosting and the customer service. And they are not cheap! I wouldn't even recommend them to my enemies.
FUCK GODADDY! GoDaddy isn't a solution; it's a rationalization, an excuse for... WHOA! Look at the hooters on her!
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
For under $500 you can get a solid dedicated server. As you grow you can continue to add more servers.
I would highly recommend SingleHop. http://www.singlehop.com/dedicated-servers/high-bandwidth-servers.php
Expenses:
- Streaming music license fees
- Bandwidth
- Server
- Time
Income:
- Nada
Plan:
- Buy more bandwidth to serve more music.
Right now it looks like "expensive hobby". Which can be cool. But if you are expecting this to put dinner on the table, figure it out now.
If you don't want to set up something like Amazon EC2, NearlyFreeSpeech has rates as low as $.20/GB for bandwidth, once you reach that tier.
https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/services/pricing
I'd go with one of their dedicated server options: http://order.1and1.com/ServerPremiumXL?__lf=Static&linkOrigin=ServerPremiumL&linkId=ctn.more.ServerPremiumL Won't post my referral link, I just think they rock.
It's not that I'm asking the big questions, it's that I'm asking lots of small ones.
I have a few dedicated servers with OVH. You get a 10 gbits connection with 30TB traffic for about 200 euros a month (2 euros per TB after that).
http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/mg_best_of.xml
Hub.org has plans that have 10 GB of storage and 1 TB of bandwidth for $30/month, and 20GB/5TB for $60, and they offer discounts if you pay a bunch of months up front (might start at quarterly, I do annual). You'd have to pay a bit extra for more storage, but they're pretty reasonable. For higher reliability you might have to pay for multiple instances or something, but it's still pretty reasonable. They've been doing a lot of upgrades lately-- ping them and see if they'll meet your needs.
First off... shes probably a C cup at best...
Secondly... if that is how you judge your vendors, then you are missing out on some great porn.
Hands down winners .... Linode
they have a lot of high traffic hosting experience
http://www.webzilla.com/
OmegaSphere is an option I would look at. Nothing like what you are talking about in their listed pricing, but a lot of their business is based on custom packages they do for people.
Hands down best I have ever used. Excellent support 24/7. www.linode.com
I use an iWeb dedicated server... $99 per month, 10TB bandwidth / 100Mbit connection, on a dual core server with 320GB hard drive and 4gb ram. That would probably work great for starters.
you can get your own method at a colo. 100mbps is anywhere from 3000 to 5000 a month but the bandwidth is dedicated, e.g. yours to abuse so to speak. That would equate to 65TB a day so maybe a 10 or 20mbps pipe.
You can easily get a machine with a 10 or 100Mbps drop for dirt cheap..
I used to use Server beach. You can get a streaming server or two from them for like $99 a month for 2tb of bandwidth and host your website where ever. Basically build a content delivery network and put stuff in different data centers =)
It kinda sounds like you're getting to the point at which you need to monetize, if you can legally do so.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
i have a 100 megabit unmetered (works out to about 32 tb per month) server with fdcservers.net. i pay $129 US a month for it. the service is excellent. not sure whether you'll be able to find that good of a deal now, but best of luck to you.
Comcast Business is $200/mo for 50mbps up/down. Seems simple enough.
It doesn't sound like you're looking for the right thing. You probably don't want "hosting", but rather a VPS, dedicated server, or a colocation.
Or are we going to have to accept a price in the thousands per month to run this kind of site, with 'going viral' providing a significant risk to our pockets?"
Then get out of the mindset of paying per GB and get a 100 meg commit instead. Maybe even a 50 meg commit will serve you well depending on your needs, but either way it's a fixed pipe with a fixed bill that you don't ever have to worry about additional bandwidth charges on.
this is my sig
In all of these discussions, I have yet to see anyone address what the Music MAFIAA wants for THEIR cut! Hosting a massive data stream like this is the LEAST of their concern, once the MAFIAA catches wind of this operation! Unless everything they're streaming is from Indie artists who have signed permission forms to waive all royalties, they're in deep doo-doo, already!
... no hosting services in iceland have ANY upload limits, they do-however have "download" limits, which means data from other countries _TO_ the server is metered, and quite expensive but ANY upload (from the server to the internet) is completely free.
Just a matter of making a deal, i'd reccomend contacting x.is and 1984.is.
Additionally, a 100 mbit connection at home in iceland is only like 7k ISK (~60 USD) with a 250 gb download (see above) cap and NO upload cap. (See: http://hringdu.is/page/yfirlit/ljos/ / http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fhringdu.is%2Fpage%2Fyfirlit%2Fljos%2F)
Here's my speed (50/50 mbit connection, ~4k ISK (~30 USD) a month) http://www.speedtest.net/result/1801028229.png
p.s. data within iceland is not metered at all, up or down.
p.p.s. if you do hit the "download" limit, they don't charge you, they slow the connection down to ~4 KB/s so you can't keep downloading but domestic speeds stay the same all the time (so yes i proxy to friends when i go over my cap).
p.p.p.s. A friend of mine even runs an anime streaming site from one of those connections in iceland at http://fluffy.is/ it runs quite well and has for about a year now on the current connection.
Enjoy
VPS may be your best bet. If you don't want to go that route. Just get a business class Verizon FiOS line at home. It should cost you somewhere in the $100-200/mo range for a symmetric 35/Mbps line with some static IPs. Host it from your own box(s) and it will be cheaper than $500/TB/mo that you are currently paying. If this is a business you may want to do a VPS or colo somewhere, since you won't have a SLA with FiOS. It is still a somewhat decent cost for that bandwidth and a static IP range. If you want to be crazy have your friend get their own FiOS circuit and do RRDNS between servers at both your locations and you will have rudimentary load-balancing of 70/Mbps with unlimited storage / unlimited data transfer and failover if one of your links goes down for whatever reason. The whole setup will cost ~$200-$400/mo not including servers/electricity.
So to be as successful as GD all I have to do is offer poor quality hosting and customer service?
Yeah, right.
Anyway--GoDaddy certainly has some issues (e.g., arrogance w/r/t customer feedback; terribly cumbersome user interface; relentless up-selling). And you know what? The ISP I switched to has some issues, too! (Different ones, but still, issues.)
And believe you me, the thing I miss most of all is GD's US-based/English-as-a-first-language/24x7x365 phone service.
You'll get much better answers here:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/index.php
Call up Cogent Communications. Ask them where the nearest carrier-neutral data centre is where they could give you a 100Mb transit connection and some simple IPv4 service (some small amount of PA space and a gateway), and how much it would cost you to use it all. That's roughly 25TB traffic, and about the smallest sensible amount of "wholesale" bandwidth you can purchase. Cogent are going to be quite cheap, and you'll be able to use the whole pipe. I'd imagine it'd be in the order of $500-1000 per month, so around 2-4c per gigabyte?
Then call that data centre and ask how for much they could co-locate a cheap 2U box (or if they have a customer who would rent you a small amount of rack space). Ask how much a cable run to Cogent would be.
Add it all up, and that's about as cheap as you can get it, at least starting from scratch. Even if you don't do this yet, you'll know how much other hosting companies are marking up what they sell. For comparison call Level3 for some "quality" bandwidth (you might need to ask for a reseller if you "only" want 100Mb). Or see how you feel about the costs of a second connection, BGP, ARIN membership and all that madness. You'll soon be your own ISP :-)
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
Verio offers unlimited bandwidth on their VPS servers. For the disk space you need today, it's $82/m. For 65GB of disk space it's $140/m. Either of those options beat what you're spending now, and you can set up a shared file system to group together the VPS servers to form a larger disk. You can get to them by
going to www.verio.net.
I would check out OpenDrive. I do not know how much it would cost you with the large amount of bandwidth you consume but my current plans allows me 100 gigabytes worth of downloading/streaming a day for 10 bucks. You can contact them and ask for a quote.
I've used Globat.com for hosting. They do offer unlimited packages, which might not be what you're looking for considering you'd expect to get kicked, but their old packages was 1TB of hosting and 1TB of bandwidth for around $7 per month. Even if you tripled that to 3TB a month you'd still be looking at the $20 dollar range, maybe.
There's also Zazeen.ca, their Ultimate Plus package gives you 1.5 TB of hosting and offers 6TB of monthly bandwidth for $85. Or their sister company Canaca.ca, which will give you unlimited monthly bandwidth at a $100 price point. Both top level packages are supported by a 100Mb up and down connection.
Canaca and Zazeen are both based in Mississauga, Ontario. Globat is based in Boston. (I'd go for the Canadian option)
HE.NET gets you 100Mbps for a full 42U around 650$/mo , just send them your server (you may need some other parts like a fast ethernet switch or PDU) If other places you look at can't beat that, don't bother with them.
Most hosting systems are crippled (eg iWeb offers 100Mbit, but only if you live in Montreal. If you pull the data from San Jose you'll only get 20Mbit) geographically so you're better off setting up your own CDN system by putting one server out east and one out west if you're planning on serving the US or Canada.
VPS systems are TERRIBLE for streaming because you have no QoS over the machine the VPS is on.
Setup your own servers and racks switches and sell, host bandwidth and rack space you don't use.
I guess this will fall off the face of slashdot and I will never see the answers.
http://www.ektoplazm.com/ The site and downloads are never slow and they have tons of music hosted on there.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Both are cheap, check them out.
My company would serve that for under $400 per month, and bandwidth isn't even our core focus. You can do much, much better than your current arrangement.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Hello,
You may want to contact Jeff Rhoden and Scott Hansen of InfoStructure.net. They would have access to great connections, if not able to do this themselves.
Jeff Rhoden, jrhoden@infostructure.net
Scott Hansen, shansen@infostructure.net
If they can't help or don't respond, Data Center West -- http://datacenterwest.com/MN.asp?pg=emailform - Talk to David Hand.
Good luck,
Steve
* tried to e-mail you and it failed.
I recently did some research into a related topic -- I was looking for hosts for a decent sized (200 GB+) database with generous bandwidth, on a shoestring budget (under $50/month, for the 2-3 machines I need).
First, choose your provider wisely. Your choice of provider may seem like it doesn't matter except for the pricing, but as your post about "unlimited" providers hints, it can and will become very important very quickly once the shit hits the fan (i.e. provider thinks you are using too much disk I/O, or too much bandwidth, or too much space, or whatever -- and promptly kicks you off).
Second, Slashdot actually isn't the best place to ask this question. Hang out in webhostingtalk for a while (e.g. this thread).
Finally, my recommendation for hosting provider: honelive. Take a look at their offerings, and particularly their specials. I jumped on the dedicated Intel Atom dual core, with 250GB storage, when it was $39/month a few months back. Today they are offering a dedicated Core i7 Quad Core with 24 GB RAM, 1TB disk, 5TB bandwidth, for $100/month. Yes you read that right -- these are dedicated machines, and these guys are for real. I sleep easier at night knowing I'm not going to wake up to an email of "we disabled your server because your VPS was using too much I/O and loading down our horribly oversold machines". It's my machine, I run what I want. I know VPSs are all the rage now, cloud computing yadda yadda yadda. And sure, they're great for hosting your personal photo gallery or blog. But take it from me, once you start burning through TBs of monthly bandwidth, and the disk I/O of a 200 GB database, they start looking flimsy real fast, and hosting providers get anxious to see you and your piddly monthly payment gone.
BTW I'm just a happy honelive customer, I have no affiliation with them, no referral codes in this post, etc. I've been burned by a lot of shady VPS providers. Don't get me wrong, there are some great providers (Linode) out there, but you will have to shell out the $$ for them, and I haven't found ANY reputable VPS provider providing the bang for the buck and stability I'm getting with honelive.
Also, I do pay for 2 or 3 other VPSs affiliated with my site, but the needs for these are comparatively tiny, so I suggest just hanging out on lowendbox and grabbing one of the deals there, if you need a few small VPSs with decent bandwidth. You can easily find several providers who will give you a few TB of bandwidth per month for around $5/month. I've used 5ite for such purposes, though I can only give them a lukewarm recommendation. I have a $2/month VPS from Securedragon right now for a similar purpose, and it works well enough (for a 100% expendable machine).
http://cltracker.net -- powerful craigslist multi-city search
No way. I'm not the OP, but GoDaddy would be off the table for any project I'd ever be involved with. There's nothing they do that a competitor can't do for about the same price (or cheaper) but without the associated ethical and PR nightmares.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
These guys do really cheap, high-bandwidth hosting: 100tb.com.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I have used and been really pleased with: http://www.seedhost.eu/dedicated-server.php
I also once talked to the guy who runs: http://www.frenchkissfm.com/
He works at the ISP that he hosts his streaming radio on so he might have some suggestions!
I've used these guys for about a year now with very good success: http://www.securedservers.com/index.php
So to be as successful as GD all I have to do is offer poor quality hosting and customer service?
You need to kidnap people's pets too.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
We've been using Server Beach for quite awhile, even on their low end servers you get ridiculous bandwidth. For a midrange dedicated server, with 10Mbs Unmetered (no limit) its $260/month...
http://www.serverbeach.com
I have yet to find dedicated servers, with the additional features (free DNS master servers etc...) for the price.
If you don't want the overhead of running your own web host with scripting etc then use a colo server just for the big files. By disabling stuff like cgi etc it will make a simple web server easier to manage and secure. You can then keep a basic hosting account elsewhere for all the smaller active content.
That is a little steep. Our company could get you 3TB/month for around $350 (wichitadatacenters.com) You would have to go with a dedicated server with that much, they start at around $100 bucks.
http://www.hostgator.com/dedicated.shtml all you need
http://www.softlayer.com/ - their base dedicated servers for $159/month come with 3000GB/month of bandwidth, exactly what you need. They've been around forever and a ton of other VPS people basically just resell their stuff anyway.
Morphing Software
Don't even recommend GoDaddy to your enemies. You don't one your enemies getting together.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
"You're fired."
And what is your business model? If $500 a month is too much, maybe you aren't charging enough for the service?
In all seriousness if you're hosting that much, pulling that much bandwidth you must have users, if you have no revenue plan right now then you probably should give up, $1500/month (or a lot less if you take some of the other examples here - S3) isn't a lot and if you can't start a business with such meagre overheads then you should probably do something else.
Amazon storage pricing is about $.14 per Terabyte per month, best deal your going to find on the net as this is my business to know...
Your welcome...
their customer service is a little bit unusual, but i've had great success with
http://hostchopper.com/
I use at least 20 providers where I currently use >25Mbps and where the server+bandwidth was $299.
Just look around a bit on stuff like webhostingtalk.com. Yes, there are the obvious "this can't be real" deals, but do some basic background checks and you'll find plenty of reputable companies that offer great deals from time to time.
I'm sure you've considered the peripheral issues such as failover and security. Depending on your service, these can easily exceed the cost of your primary HW/SW implementation. Then there is SysOps vs DevOps, which costs can be another order of magnitude. Cloud tools and services can save a lot of money if you can manage them well and kill you if you can't. If you co-locate, consider the cost savings of local verses remote travel. It can pay to visit the people who run your hardware.
Disclaimer- I work for Streamguys. I bet you can get a decent price for a vm and a 95% plan. We don't post our prices because everyone has different needs. I suggest giving us a call. The bonus is that we specialize in streaming media and can provide our customers with a level of support in that area that most other hosting companies cannot.
You need your own server. serverbeach, rachspace, lots of different options are gave to you.
$0.15/GB storage.
$0.18/GB outbound from CDN (Akamai) -- including regular transfer, ssl, and streaming.
While this sounds steep for me, as a personal use (5TB outbound is $900), I assume you're making money at this. Nonetheless, it's also a massive savings over $0.50/GB. You could keep your existing host for regular web traffic and set up a subdomain, music.yourdomain.com or whatever that's just a CNAME that points to the CDN domain.
Also, I do not work for Rackspace -- I'm just exposed to their products via my work.
Have you considered Amazon Web Services. This might be the correct solution for your requirement. "Pay-as-you go". Check out http://aws.amazon.com/
Please consider hurricane electric (he.net) - they have been a great contributor to the community (with their irc.lightning.net servers and their free ipv6 tunnels, etc.) and their bandwidth is $1/megabit.
$600/mo for a full cabinet and 100 megabits/s of bandwidth. And it's not some lame fly by night ... I highly recommend them.
You never mentioned where you were located and where you were looking for hosting. I'm assuming the US. If you're looking in Europe however you can find much better for much cheaper. For example OVH (http://www.ovh.com/fr/serveurs_dedies/), dedicated server with a 100Mb link and no traffic limit start at 50€, 1Gb link starts at 110€/month. You can go even cheaper if you accept a slightly lower quality of service (http://www.kimsufi.com)
Check out webhostingtalk.com if you want a big list of providers who can meet your needs. I personally run ioflood.com and we could host this for way cheaper, but even if you don't want to do business with us, there are dozens of reputable companies who are active on webhostingtalk who can also help.
After a certain volume all businesses have to develop a competency in supply logistics. In the case of web businesses, after a traffic threshold (interestingly pointed out in the summary), it's time to invest in your own hosting. Fortunately, once you can justify that, you're in a well-defined space of having enough traffic to also justify investment in hardware and people.
Making that leap from "garage band" to "Inc" is the real challenge, but trying to do things with the hobbyist mentality puts you at a disadvantage.
This is a shameless self promotion!
DigitalOcean.com offers free bandwidth.
You could just spin up a Droplet (virtual server) on http://digitalocean.com/ and not have any worries about the banwidth transfer as we provide free bandwidth.
The reason we're able to offer this is we don't allow adult content or users to run their own CDN but you're in the clear on both accounts.
Depending on the number of cores and RAM you need this would run you probably $100-150/mo.
Thanks!
(Jeff -- Chief Architect)
Kapsi.
The small finnish non-profit Kapsi Internet-käyttäjät ry offers over 500 GB of space, unlimited bandwidth, shell services and much more for only 35€ / year for non-commercial use. I think the concept is quite unique and there are lots of finnish quite high traffic sites hosted from there. They have servers with dedicated 1 Gbps links and a full rack of hardware on a proper server room.
You can do nice stuff as a hobby if there are no commercial interests included.
But smaller ISP's themselves pay money for 'independant' transit (e.g. for Amsterdam there are Amsix and nlix, http://www.nl-ix.net/products/pricing/).
Tell them OCTG Software, LLC sent you. They have unlimited bandwitdth included, great service, and great pricing.
http://www.oplink.net/colocation.html
I've been using iweb.com for many years. They have an extremely reliable network and their servers come with a generous amount of bandwidth. They almost always have servers under $100 that include 10TB of transfer. Make sure they give you a 100 Mbps port though as a 10 Mbps port will top out at about 3TB/month (talk to sales and you can get that for free if it's not included). Anyway, it works out to less than $0.01/GB, which I don't see many other companies offering. I burned through 6TB on my box in January without issue.
Be relentless!
Please consider hurricane electric (he.net) - they have been a great contributor to the community (with their irc.lightning.net servers and their free ipv6 tunnels, etc.) and their bandwidth is $1/megabit.
$600/mo for a full cabinet and 100 megabits/s of bandwidth. And it's not some lame fly by night ... I highly recommend them.
Wrong on so many levels. Hurricane Electric is absolutely fly-by-night. You can read about my experiences as a co-location customer if you wish. And don't try to tell me FMT2 is any better. You can review the outages.org and NANOG mailing lists for recurring problems with HE, but my first link outlines the majority of recurring items that they simply never cared to deal with. Dumping HE and going with a different co-lo provider was the best choice I ever made.
If folks considering co-location in the SF Bay Area want reliability, actual SLAs, and for less money, consider alternatives. If all you want is a 1U box in some random rack and trust other co-lo customers to never steal or fuck with your equipment, go right ahead, choose Hurricane Electric, choose Layer42, choose whoever you wish -- don't blame me when someone unplugs your Ethernet cable, steals a disk from your box, or other nonsense. If there's anything I learned from working in the co-location business over the past 20 years, it's never to trust co-lo users.
with this offer http://www.hetzner.de/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex4 you get a Core I7/16GB/2x3TB Raid 1 for 49€ / month, 100Mbit Connection, 10TB data inclusive, 6,90€ per TB after that. and for 39€/month extra you get a GBit port with 15GB traffic inclusive.
You can get unlimited/unmetered bandwidth on a 100 mbps connection for 99 euro's at Leaseweb:
http://www.leaseweb.com/en/dedicated-servers/100mbps-unmetered-servers
1 Gbps unlimited/unmetered starts at 900 euro's.
There are also plans that get you 100 TB a month on a 1 Gbps connection for 159 euro's.
I have been a very satisfied customer there for several years. Their service is good and their network even better.
Hivelocity have some cheap unmetered deals - http://hivelocity.net/dedicated-servers/unmetered-dedicated-servers/
WebHostingTalk.com
Advertising section.
VPS, Dedicated, Co-lo, all the options are there, plus you can search the forum for company names to read reviews, etc..
Good luck.
If you're going to administer the system yourself checkout Serverloft. For $139 a month you can get 5TB transfer and a decent Xeon server.
http://www.serverloft.com/dedizierte-server/server-details.php?products=6
You sound like so many of the late '90s startups. Nice ideas, but no business plan. You will notice that hundreds, if not thousands, of those start-ups are now gone. Put together a business plan and figure out how you're going to monetize your idea. Otherwise, you have an expensive hobby with no hope of long-term survival. Yeah, it sucks to be all about the money. But... that's free enterprise. It IS all about the money.
Lots of folks are recommending that you go with your own server. As someone who has gone that route before, I can tell you that unless you want to become a server admin, and deal with all security and updates, intrusion and hacking attempts, etc, you're way better off finding a place where you can get a dedicated server - and they'll do the maintenance, security and upgrades. Had my own server - and when it got hacked, it got hacked badly. My fault, because though I'm web savvy, server maintenance & security is it's own art, which I never should have attempted. (FWIW, and I do NOT work for them, I'm doing this now with Host Duplex. http://hostduplex.com/ They have been extraordinarily helpful, communicative and stable.) Hope this helps. M.
Have you looked at the amazon or other clouds? S3 hosts data at something like 10 cents per GB per month, with pretty minimal bandwidth costs. You pay for what you use. OP seems to be worries about "going viral" and getting a huge hosting bill but seems to forget that if he truly goes viral, he ought to have a ton of revenue coming in to offset those costs.
Happy customer of Swiftway here : http://www.swiftway.net/
They have datacenters in US, Holland and maybe Poland (not sure about the last). Currently paying about 110$ for a dedicated server with unmetered 100 mbps port and using about 6 TB a month of that (didn't choose it for bandwidth needs but rather for location and value of hardware for money)
They also have streaming services and CDN that's relatively cheap so that may help you stream the music reliably to people.
I'd also like to recommend Voxel.net - check them out.
Their bandwidth is $1/Mb if you're buying 10gigabit links.
deceptive advertising is a big turnoff.
I've not had problems shifting ten times the amount specified or more a month with various hosts that offer unlimited. Many limited packages offer enough that it makes them as good as unlimited (tens of terabytes a server for example). This especially tends to be the case if they are on a 1Gbps link or above. You only need to make sure you keep a track of usage (usually once a week) and have good working load balancing solution.
Can someone elaborate on this issue of getting cut off for using too much bandwidth? In my experience you usually only have to contend with contention, being put on a lower speed and getting a phone call asking to upgrade the package to one with more bandwidth or to pay for more. Those are rare incidents.
You only have to google around to find many hosts offer cheap bandwidth. Some do so to allow saturation (maximises use of what they have but causes contention) where are others are just in the right place.
I would avoid suggesting a supplier because things change constantly and what I might have looked at two months ago might be completely different today.
If it has music they WILL try to leach it (even if it is just due to their utter incompetence, though lots of people are fully convinced it is malice).
And the music publishers you're trying to entrap might end up digging an old song with nine notes of similarity to your song and suing you.
You could hack something together with Amazon Cloud Drive... https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/learnmore 35GB puts you at $50/year Might be against their TOS though....
A friend of mine brought this to my attention since I have recently been in a similar situation. I've resolved my situation by using fuse+pogoplugfs (available from Pogoplug) with 1TB of online storage for ~$60/mo. The downside is that though the storage problem has been solved, the you would be using your allocated bandwidth to your server which could get spendy on overages. I've looked at other options such as Amazon S3 which is very robust and I believe it even offers object "versioning". My hosting provider, Softlayer also has a Cloud Object Storage solution that looks like a good contender (more info). Anyways, these are solutions I've reviewed and thought I would share them in brief with you.
contact val@he.net (hurricane electric) they do a dedicated server with 100Mbps included for $150 a month, and the more bandwidth you subscribe for, the cheaper it gets.
I host a podcast with about a third of that traffic on wordpress.com. Just get a wordpress blog, pay them a pittance per year (mine is 30$) and they will serve audio files until you hit your cap.
Are you streaming music? What type of streaming do you use? Icecast? Have you asked if some of your users would like to host some relays? There are also certain pages out there that offers relaying, in exchange for some branding (or in some cases, ads on the relay page)
And what kind of hardware do you need? Software? Are you looking for a full server, or just streaming relay?
Have you looked at VPS'es? Some offer pretty good deals on bandwidth (although you should contact them first and check if its okay to actually use the deals.. ). One example : http://www.alvotech.de/vserver/ - when it comes to bandwidth they say:
The available bandwidth per vServer is 1,000Mbps. Once traffic has reached 1,000 GB the bandwidth is limited to 10Mbps until the end of the month. Upon request, the traffic limit can be replaced with a fee of 6.90 EUR per 1,000 GB additional traffic.
And yes, a VPS is perfectly fine for serving net radio to a few hundred users, if you got some external relays for the bandwidth hogging.
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
Personally I'd suggest 5 or 10 low end boxes (http://lowendbox.com) from various providers... most of them offer 200 GB of bandwidth or more on a single VPS which should give you plenty of space and bandwidth.
Try wtfserve.com.. run by the legendary Abi Rendon, cheap and affordable no-bullshit hosting, just make sure you are capable of installing/running your server from an OS on up.
Please consider hurricane electric (he.net) - they have been a great contributor to the community (with their irc.lightning.net servers and their free ipv6 tunnels, etc.) and their bandwidth is $1/megabit.
$600/mo for a full cabinet and 100 megabits/s of bandwidth. And it's not some lame fly by night ... I highly recommend them.
Please consider hurricane malt liquor - they have been a great contributor to the community (with their availability to low-income families and their free drunk/disorderly charges, etc.) and their bandwidth is $1/megabottle.
$15 for a full case and 6 gallons/minute of bandwidth. And it's not some lame fly by night ... I highly recommend them.
FTFY
http://www.100tb.com/ looks like it's exactly what you'd want. $200/month for a dedicated server, 100TB of bandwidth. and no, from my experience they don't oversell - you can literally use 100tb if you want.
I just tried to buy a VPS and for every offering I get the error "We are currently out of stock on this item...". Too many clients?
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
try 100tb.com , I've read good reviews, if you check them out do share yours. ps as long as you stick to their predefined server configurations prices are competitive, but if you require more hardware (storage) things tend to get pricey there.
people pay for music?