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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)
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)
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.
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.
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.
I'll agree OVH has some beefy server options with 20TB traffic. Depending on your needs, you could get by with an EG class server for £99.99 which is roughly $158.18
http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/eg_best_of.xml
I believe OVH is the best option out there. A friend of mine has a server with over 10,000 active users and the system and bandwidth seem to keep up quite nicely according to him, but he is using the HG class server too.
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.
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
I've in the past ran a site that started with tens, then hundreds of megabits, then gigabits of traffic, and have found two good options:
1. http://www.fdcservers.net/
FDCservers has had great support. They are absolutely the cheapest per-megabit in North America, with rates of <$150 for 100Mbps, which you can easily push with even a mediocre server. Their plans also don't require you to build or buy your own servers, which is great.
2. http://www.leaseweb.com/
In Europe, you can look into Leaseweb. Based in Amsterdam, they have great rates (<$150 too for 100Mbps) for their dedicated servers, slightly worse support than FDCservers, but still pretty good service. They're based in Amsterdam, and have pretty decent North American data transfer rates despite their location.
Yeah. You definitely gotta shop around in order to find good deals, but they are out there. I've had had particularly good experience in Canada, actually, for stuff that will normally get you chucked out of a datacenter in the US.
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.
That's an awful suggestion for this purpose. Linode is great, but charges a fortune for unusually large storage/transfer needs. Their biggest Linode at the moment has only 800G of space and 2T of transfer (and 20G of memory) for $800/month. That's going to be way overkill on the memory and huge underkill on the storage and transfer, and would already blow the budget.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
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*
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?
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?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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;
http://www.hostgator.com/dedicated.shtml all you need
OVH also has a support option which is "Hey, you made a urgent ticket. Isn't that nice? We might look at it in two weeks."
OVH's support is literally 9-5 French time, Monday to Friday. There is ZERO out of hours support; and they have such a backlog that tickets dont even get looked into for a few business days.
#!/bin/csh cat $0
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
And what is your business model? If $500 a month is too much, maybe you aren't charging enough for the service?
The summary states that they already have the rights to stream the music. As the question was about hosting, that's what is being answered, not questioning the assertion made in the summary that they already have those rights. (How they got those rights, who from, at what cost, or even if they actually have them is not relevant to the question being asked)
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.
their customer service is a little bit unusual, but i've had great success with
http://hostchopper.com/
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.
$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.
I've seen pricing on serious bandwidth -- it's just too expensive. Example: REALLY good pricing on 50mb/s (20mb/s commit) is somewhere around $1600/mo. The 20mb/s commit means your average bandwidth for the month doesn't go over 20mb/s -- they usually drop the highest and lowest couple days or the like to calculate their average. Bump it to, say, 150mb/s with a 50mb/s commit and you're up to $2200/mo. The only other number I remember off the top of my head was for 10gb/s was well, well into six figures per month.
None of that's crazy if you need it, but it's going to hurt if you don't have a really good chunk of start-up capital to keep you going until you've set up whatever hosting/reselling you're hoping falls into place.
Anyway, point being, it ain't gonna work if this music project is having trouble with $500/mo. bandwidth bills.
Weeellll...they are a fantastic provider, but what you pay a lot for bandwidth. You get a great VPS, but they're not really designed for this kind of high bandwidth, unless you also need correspondingly high cpu.
Maybe linode coupled with a good CDN.
Advice: on VPS providers
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)
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)
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.
Oh lolz. Turns out it doesn't matter how awful a suggestion this is for this purpose, as long as you get to post a referral link.
Downmod parent as spam.
Oh whoop! Another referral link!
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
Hetzner seem better than LeaseWeb up to a point: http://www.hetzner.de/en/ :)
LeaseWeb offer 100TB for relatively little, which is great, but Hetzner have better spec servers at 10TB/month. Multiple Hetzner servers might be better choice in *some* cases. Hetzner's servers are bog-standard consumer hardware for the most part, but they've recently added two Xeon offers with ECC RAM to the main range. I've used them for two years for all sorts of things, including bursts of high throughput. It's nice when you have the 1Gbit NIC option
That little asterisk next to LeaseWeb's two highest bandwidth options is a bit worrisome - it says "best effort". Hetzner give 10TB with all servers and have the data centre to back it up. Using more than the limit with them puts the speed down to 10Mbit/s, but each TB is 6.90 Euros monthly. That turns out cheaper than the top LeaseWeb server, so spreading 100TB/month across a number of Hetzner servers might turn out to be more reliable than LeaseWeb.
If gaming levels of latency aren't a requirement I'd always recommend European servers anyway. I'm not sure how Hetzner keep the prices so low, but I've heard it's because of the low cost of electricity. I've spent the past week trying to find a better option for me, but I've ended up back at Hetzner. Ordering an EX S4 soon, which will be nice when I'm only used to the old EQ range.
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.
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.
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."
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
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.