How to Find a High Bandwidth & Secure Webhost?

June 6, 2006 9:48 PM

How to Find a High Bandwidth & Secure Webhost? Recommendations? Directory?

I work for a company that wants to launch this promotion along with weekly web video updates - the promotion has a pretty big prize so I imagine there will e much interest - how do we find a professional business web host that can handle add'l bandwidth and scale up as it goes?

We do have a website now but it's pretty minimal and the company is pretty smalltime. We have posted video before and playback can be slow.

For companies like Akami (sp?), do people negotiate separately with them or are they a webhost also?

Or hire a consultant? How much would that be?

Thanks.

posted by jbelkin to computers & internet (4 comments total)

So, a couple of things from experience... and questions you should be asking internally and of potential providers...

Is this a long term project/endeavor and will it have e-commerce...ie will you be conducting transactions through it ?

Is the content aside from the video dynamic ? This is important, Akamai really does well with static content with dynamic content you really can't take advantage of it.

A couple of things any hosting provider is going to want to know and that you should know when trying to find one.

- You're going to need projections of bandwidth and visitors.
- Do you have preference for how the content is delivered...specific encodings, preferred services ?
- Does the server need to be unix or windows ?
- Do you require development and professional services work to get your project off the ground ?
- How much of a budget do you have, be realistic...if you don't have in house talent that can do a lot of this and has done it before you will likely need to hire a consultant or hire the hosting companies professional services group to develop and implement this for you. This is very expensive.
- Are you prepared to monitor, maintain and manage the server/services you purchase? What SLA's are you looking for?

You should have all of these questions and as many others as you can think of answered before pricing out a solution and looking for services or you won't be able to accuratelly guage the cost and timelines for delivery internally and with your chosen provider.

The more you do internally the cheaper it is. Hosted servers and bandwidth are cheap, technical skill sets to implement and manage what you describe can expensive.
posted by iamabot at 11:25 PM on June 6, 2006

How much bandwidth are you talking about?

Places like layeredtech.com provide unmetered high performance servers on a 100mbit uplink.
posted by aeighty at 11:26 PM on June 6, 2006

dreamhost.com is da bomb
posted by bd at 12:04 AM on June 7, 2006

Ignore the Dreamhost whores. It sounds like you're talking about a fairly large business endeavor, not just hosting a blog.

If it's something pretty big, you'd want to skip the web hosting packages all together and go with a dedicated server. Ie, serverbeach, rackspace, etc.

Akamai is a content delivery network. AT&T has one too - what we do here is have a 50mbit commit with AT&T on their CDN (Content Delivery Network) and AT&T mirrors our files worldwide and serves them to customers based on their geographical location. It's fast as all hell. Much faster than what we had before (3 boxes, load balanced, on a gigabit ethernet link)

Savvis has a similar service. You might not need 50mbit, but AT&T will sign you up with a much lower commit rate. It'll just cost you a bit more.
They (all 3 companies, actually) will work with you to pass through authentication.

We have been very happy with the AT&T CDN setup so far, and we're pushing out lots of files as well as some video.
posted by drstein at 12:11 PM on June 7, 2006