MagicJigPipe
International Hazard
Posts: 1554
Registered: 19-9-2007
Location: USA
Member Is Offline
Mood: Suspicious
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Web Hosting Suggestions & Considerations
I will soon be purchasing a domain name and a year of web hosting service. I will be using it to backup my personal files, to host a simple
science/chemistry/physics/personal website (and possibly more complex as times goes on) and to host an FTP for people to download journal articles,
books, instructional videos etc... The FTP could very well be replaced by a simple download page although I believe this would be more risky as far
as legal-ness goes.
I need:
*Unlimited space: (or if there is a limit then at least 3-5 TB)
*Unlimited bandwidth: (again, limit must be a few TB a month)
*FTP access
*Typical Website scripting tools
*Few restrictions on file types and limited potential for censorship
I found this site:
http://www.top10webhosting.com/
The first company on the list seems too good to be true. Is there anything else that I need to consider before making this investment? Is there any
more information or advice you guys can give me? Thanks.
"There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry ... There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any
question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors. ... We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it and
that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. And we know that as long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think,
free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost, and science can never regress." -J. Robert Oppenheimer
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Polverone
Now celebrating 21 years of madness
Posts: 3186
Registered: 19-5-2002
Location: The Sunny Pacific Northwest
Member Is Offline
Mood: Waiting for spring
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Lower your expectations or be prepared to pay a breathtaking amount of money. If you go with a cheap web host you will have lots of people sharing one
physical machine for their websites. I have yet to see a web host that provisions a single machine with 3 TB of disk, much less let one customer use
all of it for $5/month.
It is possible to get a good bargain with cheap hosts as long as you're willing to take a chance and live with the limitations. The main limitation of
unlimited service is that other people are attracted by unlimited service offers too. They may take up all of the CPU time, RAM, or disk space and
leave little for you. This happened to this site's first web host. It was ok for a while, but I had to move because I officially had a gigabyte of
disk quota left, in reality there was no disk space left on the server's home directory. You can't expect a web host to care about little niceties
like that when they're A) getting only $5/month and B) paid for years up-front. For similar reasons, cheap web hosts are often inattentive to hardware
upgrades, maintaining backups, or hiring knowledgeable employees. "Unlimited" means that the company doesn't officially impose limits, not that
they've defied physics and economics to turn finite dollars into infinite computing capacity.
More commonly, it is not disk space that peters out first, but CPU, RAM, or specific services like databases. If you just want to serve static files,
rather than run a dynamic site (like a blog or a forum), cheap web hosts can be great bargains. In fact I moved this forum to a VPS because the old
host, Micfo, was too unreliable for forum needs. I kept all the library content on the Micfo host machine and set it up with a new subdomain, since
they're fine for hosting plain files and it saves a lot of bandwidth and disk space on the more expensive VPS.
Even having said that cheap web hosts are fine for serving files, which you want to do, there are limitations. I will be absolutely astounded if you
can find a cheap web host that puts you on a machine with 500 GB of disk space free, much less 3 TB. Web hosts can get a headache when some copyright
holder sends them a complaint. Even if you keep the site quiet, they can also get a headache if it appears that your site is using up a lot of disk
space and/or bandwidth, and then they may look for reasons (like copyright infringement) to curtail your use or drop you as a customer.
PGP Key and corresponding e-mail address
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MagicJigPipe
International Hazard
Posts: 1554
Registered: 19-9-2007
Location: USA
Member Is Offline
Mood: Suspicious
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Thanks for all the valuable info, obviously this is the first time I have looked into this in years.
I will do some more looking around and reading before I make any investment.
"There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry ... There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any
question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors. ... We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it and
that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. And we know that as long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think,
free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost, and science can never regress." -J. Robert Oppenheimer
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woelen
Super Administrator
Posts: 8027
Registered: 20-8-2005
Location: Netherlands
Member Is Offline
Mood: interested
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What you are talking about requires so-called "dedicated server" webhosting. You hire a slot (usually 1U height) with AC-power, a direct Internet
connection and possibly extra services like "remote reboot" when the server is not available anymore. Some companies, offering dedicated server
hosting also offer a server, others require you to buy a server, configiure it and then it is installed for you in the 1U rack. The latter type of
company then tell you what physical dimensions the server must have and what maximum power consumption is allowed. You have complete freedom, but also
must accept high cost.
Such dedicated server hosting only is available at high-speed nodes (e.g. in Europe we have AMS-IX and GN-IX) and hence you are limited to certain
locations, which may be far from your home. Cost of this kind of hosting is at least a few tens of dollars per month, expect 50+ dollars per month
when you do not want to accept artifically imposed limits on available bandwidth and amount of data traffic per month.
If your wishes are somewhat less strong, then the following might be interesting for you:
http://www.one.com
I have hosting at this party for just EUR 1.25 (appr. $1.7) for 3 GByte storage and no artifically imposed limits on data traffic. For 25 GByte
storage you pay EUR 4.90 (appr. $7) per month. They offer FTP access, PHP-programming, MySQL databases and of course webpage hosting.
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MagicJigPipe
International Hazard
Posts: 1554
Registered: 19-9-2007
Location: USA
Member Is Offline
Mood: Suspicious
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Thanks for the info woelen. This is definitely enough for my needs if you take away one of the considerations I was making (see below):
At first I was thinking of combining two of my "needs" into one (backup of personal files at a remote location in case of fire, flood, theft, etc...
and website/file hosting) which is why the large requirements for bandwidth and storage were an issue but I now realize that this is probably not
economically feasible.
Now I need some ideas for "on-site" backup of these files that would reduce the risk of them being stolen or destroyed. I couldn't say, bury them,
because I need to constantly update the data/files. A lot of ideas are running through my mind. Does anyone else have experience with this or some
insight to offer me?
Also, the files take up about 500GB now and it is very likely that they will grow to multiple TB (probably even PB) in the future. Yes, a large
percentage is digital video.
I thought of getting a Blu-Ray writer (dual layer = ~50GB; right now they are expensive but surely not for long). I wonder if the long-term
reliability of something like that would be better or worse than a magnetic hard drive. So many considerations.
Ideas?
"There must be no barriers to freedom of inquiry ... There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any
question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors. ... We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it and
that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. And we know that as long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think,
free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost, and science can never regress." -J. Robert Oppenheimer
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Eclectic
National Hazard
Posts: 899
Registered: 14-11-2004
Member Is Offline
Mood: Obsessive
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Get an ESATA dock and the cheapest megabyte/$ drives you can find....probably the most cost effective backup nowadays....backup to 500meg or 1TB
drives and then take them offline. Have good shockcushioned and if pos
sible airtight storage for the drives...maybe a small safe.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&am...
[Edited on 1-31-2010 by Eclectic]
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