shared hosting for big files?

February 26, 2006 12:17 PM

I'm looking for suggestions for inexpensive webhosting with generous transfer allowances (0.5TB+) who can actually deliver.

Last fall, I set up the servers for a little project that ended up serving 2TB of digital audio in the space of a week or so, and another TB or so over the next month. Since then, traffic has fallen off quite a bit and I'm taking a look at our hosting options going forward.

I was really pleased with how cheaply we managed to handle the load, but now I'm looking at cutting costs and eliminating my responsibilities as a system administrator. I've been interested in some web hosting companies that offer inexpensive web hosting with montly transfer allowances in the 1TB range. I doubt we'll see that much traffic in a month again, but it would be nice to have the headroom, just in case.

1TB/month works out to 33GB a day, but it's easy to imagine that if there were another surge, we could do 1/4 of our monthly allowance in a single day, and I'm a little worried about providers limiting peaks in such a way that would make it impossible to get near our true allotment.

So, my question. Can anyone offer their experiences with any inexpensive ($10-40) web hosting plans in the US that promise transfer allowances in the 500GB-1.5TB range? Were they able to handle days when you had a huge spike in traffic on the order of over 100GB/day (preferably with >1MB files), or is there any evidence that they limited your transfer rates significantly when you got hit with traffic spikes?

Your experiences are much appreciated.

posted by Good Brain to computers & internet (12 comments total)

Dreamhost now starts their $9.95/month account with 1TB of monthly transfer. I haven't moved anywhere near that much data, but have generally been happy with their service. Everything they offer is highly automated - I hav not ever needed to speak with an actual human.
posted by b1tr0t at 12:28 PM on February 26, 2006

Dreamhost offers 1 TB per month for $8.
posted by danb at 12:31 PM on February 26, 2006

Whoops.

Also, the $8 that I quoted is for a two-year plan. Sorry 'bout that.
posted by danb at 12:32 PM on February 26, 2006

You get what you pay for.

As someone who has worked for an ISP, and someone who currently owns a colocated server housed by a good provider, I can say the following with a lot of experience to back it up:

Unless you don't consider this website "mission critical" (i.e. you don't mind downtime, you don't mind bandwidth throttling, etc) - there is no such thing as what you are looking for.

It costs more than $9.95/month to push 1TB of data - period. That's an average of about 3-4mbits of sustained bandwidth, and a vastly higher burst speed.

You will not get the real quality of service you need for a server that forks over that much media for "$10-$40". Read the webhostingtalk forums for yourself, and poke around the hosting deals and people's comments on them.
posted by twiggy at 12:37 PM on February 26, 2006

i agree w/ twiggy, i think you would be dissappointed in a cheap shared-servers performance.
posted by yeahyeahyeahwhoo at 12:44 PM on February 26, 2006

Here's a few threads - though you'll have to skim over some stupid pile-ons once in a while to get to the details on dreamhost: 1, 2 [see posts #10+ in here], 3.
posted by twiggy at 12:46 PM on February 26, 2006

I tried dreamhost, and found their servers to be "fast" when serving static data. My only test was to repeatedly download a 10 megabyte file over a 5mbit cablemodem connection, but the rates were good by my standards (300 kilobytes/second and up). You're talking about using .25TB/day, which is an average of 23 megabits/second over 24 hours, so obviously that's a good bit faster than I was able to test.

Unfortunately, I also found that they were very slow running my CGI scripts. (true CGI interface, written in Python, so I don't really blame them) But this is what killed the deal for me.

On the third hand, since I canceled within the first 90 days, I got my money back. There was absolutely zero hassle getting a refund.

I'd say it's worth giving dreamhost a try. You get a 90-day money back guarantee, and with various promotional/referral codes you can get a very cheap first year of service. I used the "DMH" code which I found here
posted by jepler at 1:08 PM on February 26, 2006

Related AskMe about DreamHost
posted by Sharcho at 4:59 PM on February 26, 2006

I'd not have thought that a cheap $120/month dedicated server with 2TB of transfer would have been able to handle the traffic we pumped out without interference by the hosting company, but it worked for us. They were surely overselling bandwidth heavily too, but had enough in aggregate to handle their customers spikes. I thought a shared host might be able to do better, since they'd be reducing a key capital outlay.

Thanks for the perspective. I'd still be interested in hearing from anyone who has had good or bad experience with doing high volumes on a shared host.

I think we may try getting accounts with a couple of different hosts and using zoneedit's failover service to mitigate issues with poor service. This stuff isn't mission critical for us like an ecommerce site would be.
posted by Good Brain at 5:17 PM on February 26, 2006

As usual, everyone is going to whore out Dreamhost. If you're pushing out *that much* data, chances are they're going to try to upsell you to a dedicated server. twiggy speaks the truth. At a provider I used to work for, it was very common to ding users for 'excessive resource usage' - which is just what Dreamhost will do if you're not careful.

You may consider Server Pronto or Server Beach. - or, one of many other dedicated hosting providers.

Almost less hassle to find some kid in Sweden or Japan that's on a home 100bT connection to host it. Bandwidth here in the us is plentiful, yet can be costly. :-|

/has been in the web hosting biz longer than he has wanted to.
posted by drstein at 6:55 PM on February 26, 2006

jepler - after leaving dreamhost, what hosting service did you find that runs CGI scripts quickly?
posted by richg at 12:48 AM on February 27, 2006

1&1 offers 1TB bandwidth for 10$/month. I don't know if they're any good.
If I were you I'd probably try first DreamHost, and when they start complaining, move some of the files to 1&1.
posted by Sharcho at 5:17 AM on February 27, 2006