fast, solid, non-lame name

February 19, 2008 4:21 AM

Reliable paid file-hosting service that allows hotlinking and has a neutral, professional domain name?

I'm switching to a new web hosting company because its policies are clearly right for me. This company bills according to bandwidth usage rather than on a monthly flat-fee basis. So I'll want to host my large media files with a different company, and hotlink to them from my sites.

- I want to pay in the $10/mo neighborhood if possible, to host maybe 600MB to 800MB total of mp3s and large images (all of which I own the rights to);

- I anticipate under 10GB of downloads per month total, (occasionally spiking higher, in which case I'd like non-crazy overage fees);

- I want ftp access for myself and for two or three other people (but I don't need any public ftp access, just regular http hotlinking);

- I'll go for the most neutral and professional-sounding name I can find (I don't want these files getting served from, like, myfilebuddy.com or easywebhost123.com).


This could be a dedicated file-storage company, a web hosting company, an online backup service (that allows hotlinking and the amounts of bandwidth I'm expecting) or anything else.

posted by allterrainbrain to computers & internet (12 comments total)

(To clarify, 10GB is more like a safe 'ceiling' amount for the monthly downloads; realistic global average is probably more like 3GB/mo. So I'd consider, for example, a service that allows 5GB/mo if it has reasonable overage fees.)
posted by allterrainbrain at 4:29 AM on February 19, 2008

It sounds like you just want some commodity web hosting with high bandwidth. Dreamhost is doing a 500 GB storage, 5 TB monthly bandwidth hosting deal for $10.95 a month plus $49.95 setup at the moment (with discounts if you pay in advance). You'd be able to use your own domain name, and I'm pretty certain you'd be able to set up FTP access to suit your needs.
posted by chrismear at 4:41 AM on February 19, 2008

How about nearlyfreespeech? I don't know if the name is professional enough for you, but it also bills only on bandwidth, starting at ~$1/GB and going down after the first GB. They offer pretty much anything you'd need to host a site: I'd be surprised (and interested) if the hosting you're using for the main site compares well to them.
posted by jacalata at 4:45 AM on February 19, 2008

oops, they charge for storage as well. 1c/megabyte/month, which would bring your 800mb storage + 3G bandwidth to ~$10/month.
posted by jacalata at 4:49 AM on February 19, 2008

S3 for media files, Site5 or some other shared host for static stuff.
posted by fleeba at 5:38 AM on February 19, 2008

Have you considered Amazon S3? Amazon S3 charges just for the bytes you store, bytes you transmit, and number of requests serviced. For 0.8 GB storage, 10 GB data out, 10000 requests (I got this number by assuming a 1 MB avg. transfer size), the monthly cost would be about $2. However, Amazon S3 doesn't have a native FTP interface. You can use an Amazon-specific client (Jungle Disk or others) to access the content, or, if you wish, several FTP clients support access to Amazon S3 (e.g. Interarchy, etc.).
posted by RichardP at 5:47 AM on February 19, 2008 [1 favorite]

Actually, my use of Jungle Disk as an example was poor, it uses a storage scheme on S3 that is more appropriate for internet backups, not serving media files. A better example of an Amazon-specific client would have been S3Fox Organizer for Firefox.

You might take a look at the following two articles: Using Amazon S3 as an Image Hosting Service and Offload your multimedia content and bandwidth to Amazon using PHP.
posted by RichardP at 6:07 AM on February 19, 2008 [1 favorite]

S3 looks VERY promising. Cheap, totally scalable with no surprises, and most importantly, realistic!

(Dreamhost's offer seems red-flaggily unrealistic: I wonder about a company that would offer 5 *TB* of transfer for $11/mo [I checked their front page, that's no typo]. They're obviously expecting those customers will only average a tiny fraction of that -- which might be true or they might get surprised, but either way it's enough of a silly overpromise that it just makes me wonder how realistic they are about their own systems/speeds/reliability.)
posted by allterrainbrain at 6:08 AM on February 19, 2008

S3 works great. S3 Browser is a free OS X client for managing your files.
posted by Armitage Shanks at 6:14 AM on February 19, 2008

I'll recommend S3 as well - very flexible, realistic rates..

You can also use your own domain name.
posted by TravellingDen at 6:54 AM on February 19, 2008

From the dreamhost tos:

The customer agrees to make use of DreamHost Web Hosting servers primarily for the purpose of hosting a website, and associated email functions. Data uploaded must be primarily for this purpose; DreamHost Web Hosting servers are not intended as a data backup or archiving service. DreamHost Web Hosting reserves the right to negotiate additional charges with the Customer and/or the discontinuation of the backups/archives at their discretion. If you exceed your allocated transfer bandwidth for a month, you will be billed at the rate of $1 per additional 10GB.

I have no idea how this works out in practice. In fact, I'd love to hear anyone's experiences.
posted by rdr at 8:48 AM on February 19, 2008

allterrainbrain and rdr. As far as dreamhost goes, you get great service considering the cheapness of the service. There is no way you can really transfer 5 TB in a month, but they will transfer 100GB without breaking a sweat (and won't charge you for it). The 5 TB is mostly just "infinite" as far as bandwidth goes.

As far as hosting versus backup or archiving, just make sure there are web sites associated with the data you put up. Then you're a very large web site, and they won't notice. They especially won't notice at 3 GB / month.

Dreamhost does have a few stability issues every once in a while, but they keep up on them and are good about keeping people up to date.

Personally I'm moving away from dreamhost simply because I'd prefer a VPS for my nerdy side to come out and play, but they've been good to me for the two years I've been with them. If you need more than just file hosting, take a closer look (and use a coupon code! 90 bucks off the first year).
posted by cschneid at 3:21 PM on February 19, 2008