Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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 $2/month VPS from Securedragon right now for a similar purpose, and it works well enough (for a 100% expendable machine).
http://cltracker.net -- powerful craigslist multi-city search
I was going to suggest Megaupload.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
I had considered dropping the site name, but the site would probably be offline within the hour. :)
Thanks everyone for the responses - looks like for the price we're talking about, going to a Colo is the better solution.
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.