Hello; I'm going to be launching some new sites, in the pet care industry, all with my own fully legal content. I will be hosting videos, I have some online now in my blog, I encode them in flv and this seems to work fairly well for the size of videos I have. There are many different hosts I see recommended here, but almost everyone of them offers very high amounts of transfer for very little money. I know this can't be a sustainable business model. I owed a good size local ISP back in the day (dial in), so understand the overselling tricks people are using. I am highly reluctant to do business with any of these companies that I know are overselling, because I feel that once I get more traffic on this site, I will just have to move it again. The main company I have been considering, one that I am quite confident will handle any amount of traffic without complaint is Rackspace. Rackspace sells transfer for .22 a gb (plus cost of server time). I have read a number of comments online where people have said that they feel Rackspace is on the expensive side and there are other less expensive options. My Questions: Are there any other hosting companies that are in the same league as Rackspace, that I can trust to deliver the amount of bandwith they sell? If so, are they any cheaper and who are they? Thanks very much, j
Posting a clarification on my requirements: For the sake of conversation here, I'd like to know that the host can scale up to 10gb of disk space and 1TB of transfer. This will cost me around $300 per month at RackSpace, depending on how much processing power the site requires. j
Rackspace is a fairly expensive, but you do get what you pay for. If your looking for alternatives I would suggest a managed VPS such as WiredTree, KnownHost, ServInt, and LiquidWeb. You can head over to webhostingtalk.com and find some in-depth reviews on all those providers.
Thank You. Do you have any thoughts on "cloud services" for large sites due to the scalability? Thanks, J
I just took a look at WiredTree, they are offering 1TB of transfer for $49 a month. Is that sustainable pricing, that is still about 1/6 of the price of RackSpace. Thanks J
WiredTree is a a good provider in terms of a Managed VPS and you can't go wrong with them. However don't forget to check the other providers as well and contact them each directly with what you need and see what they can offer you. If they're not capable of meeting your needs I would just stick with Rackspace.
Since you more to bandwidth,i would suggest you use CDN network such as amazon s3,its more economic in long run
Based on your suggestions, I'd say go for www.fazewire.com as he has several servers in his rack including mine. Also, there's www.wholesaleinternet.com which has a few bargain servers if you want with 1500 GB a month on 100mbps or 10mbps unmetered full duplex. Search on Web Hosting Talk for their deals thread though.
Try us: www.dhruvahosting.com We have plans which allow media streaming and file hosting. Direct link to the plans are: http://www.dhruvahosting.com/hosting.php?spt=5 You are allowed to host files and stream media. Make the full use of the allocated diskspace and bandwidth. We undersell to give you the best experience. You can upgrade the diskspace and bandwidth later at affordable rates if you need.
You are right to be cautious of overselling, see our post here - http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1559108 where we have tried at some length, to provide tips on choosing a web host, which we hope goes some way to assure you we are a 'real' host. We also provide generous storage and traffic allowances with all our plans which I think you will find very reasonably priced. However, as we stressed in our article post, these limits apply to active website content and cannot be used for archive/storage etc. You also quite correctly highlighted the important aspect of CPU demand and website resources etc which can be a restriction with shared hosting. In the vast majority of cases our shared hosting plans are structured to meet the clients needs however, we always have the option to move clients sites to our VPS, Semi Dedicated and fully Dedicated servers again at very reasonable prices, upon request May we suggest once you have your shortlist of hosts, you contact each with your specific pre-sales questions and requirements etc, not only so you get back written commitments but it will also allow you to sample the speed and quality of their response to help gauge their future level of support. Best of luck with your search.
These providers are also at the top of my list of good managed VPS. Not so familiar with LiquidWeb but sure have read a lot of good things about the other 3. For unmanaged VPS, I'd recommend Linode. If you are gonna sign up with wiredtree, here are some coupons of them.
If you need solid, possibly 99.99999% uptime hosting I would recommend Amazon EC2; it's scalable (infinitely almost), you can start very very very small, backups are taken care of. You can develop your setup in such way that it autoscales and automatically withstands failure. Also there they have CloudFront CDN to host your images/videos and other artifacts on for maximum performance. I
That company is one of the best and the biggest and I'm sure they have a lot of resellers. Just resellers might not tell they are resellers.