I was curious to get your guy's opinion on the best way to handle file downloads. I've been working on a site that provides educational applications to individuals and in order for them to run they must download a 3rd party plugin (which I've been hosting), and the application file. Together the plugin and an application would be around 40mb. I've done quite a bit of research and compared numbers to other sites and it's not arrogant to think that within 6 or so months this site would be getting 20-30 thousand page views a day, or more. Then take into account that for 20-30 thousand views maybe 10k would actually download the plugin and application....that puts my DAILY traffic usage up to around 400GB! I was curious to see how some of you would handle this problem? I know a lot of webhosts out there advertise UNLIMITED bandwidth / traffic, but when you read the TOS, UNLIMITED doesn't include binary files. Most of them have it setup to where binary files can only be ~40% of your total traffic /bandwidth usage. I spoke with a representative from an established hosting company that deals in the kind of sites that mine happens to be a part of and they seem to be perfect for hosting, rather pricy compared to others but 100% uptime is guaranteed and they secure/update the server. Only thing with this is that they give you 500gb a month of traffic, then every gb after that costs $0.18 which adds up quickly when your talking 400gb a day. I know there are file hosts out there but haven't put much research into them. I figured they were going to have some clause that would exclude this size of traffic usage Any thoughts or opinions are more than appreciated! Thanks guys!!
400 GB per day comes out to about 12 TB per month. That's not unreasonable to find from a dedicated server provider, but will likely be a bit more expensive. Some providers to take a look at: - Gigenet - 100TB.com - Hivelocity
There is no host that is going to let you use that kind of bandwidth on a shared/reseller/etc. account. As Ghan_04 says, you are going to need a dedicated server for that kind of traffic. If all you're doing is serving files, the server doesn't need to be particularly robust, as far as CPU and RAM is concerned. It just needs to have a lot of bandwidth. You should be ableto get such a setup at a fairly reasonable cost.
Thanks for the input! I looked into the for-mentioned hosts as well as one i stumbled across http://www.razorservers.com/ they've got the best deal so far but i'm not sure what their support is like compared to the others. The actual server itself doesn't need to be anything too fancy. The current project is running of the LAMP stack. It consists of 2 mysql databases and your average .php files and images. The only thing that i really need to upgrade is the bandwidth and my current host doesn't have an option for a dedicated server capable of supporting the kind of traffic I'm anticipating....better safe than sorry :/ But i didn't figure ~$160 a month was bad at all for what you get from razorservers...thoughts/opinions?
Any chance you could offload the downloads through a CDN like dropbox, amazon, or any of the download service providers? Using an extra server just to host downloads seems like a waste.
That also crossed my mind but I think I'm just going to bite the bullet and go for the dedicated box. That way I've got my own server and more than enough resources to expand down the road. Plus this way if anyone wanted the file they'd have to hit my server/browse to my site to obtain it. Not that It'd matter much since they're encrypted and can only be read by this third party plugin but still...it's peace of mind in a way, and if I actually do see the traffic numbers that I'm trying to prepare for, the cost of the dedicated server should be comparable to dropping a quarter out of your pocket every month :/
Not so sure about Razor Servers. I've never used them, but a quick search on Web Hosting Talk for them yields these top results: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1160204 http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1156129 http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1155308 http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1155356 http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1151768 http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1154327 I did find one good review on the first page of results: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1122605 I also found this deal from HiVelocity (again, have not used them, but I have seen good reviews on them): Dual Xeon Quad Core E5504 2.0GHz, 12GB RAM, 2 x 500GB hard drives, RAID 1, 10TB transfer, 100Mbps port $189.00/MO, $0 SETUP It's a special, so you'll have to check with them for availability. http://hivelocity.net/dedicated-servers/specials/
Thanks for the replies! @ Ghan_04 I'm going to look into the links you provided, much appreciated. I emailed razor servers Thursday and didn't get a reply until today and the answers to my questions were very abrupt...I'm not sure if I want to do business with a server company that takes that long to reply to a few simple questions and then to answer them in that manner...I'll let you know if i decide to go with one of the companies you have provided. @FrankBWH You have raised my suspicion about metered and unmetered ports...I'm going to do a bit of research on this topic. Greatly appreciated!
I might be able to help you with metered vs unmetered ports. Or at least provide a bit of an explanation. Metered: This means the host monitors how much bandwidth you use and generally provides you a cap on how much you get. So that way if you exceed the cap, they bill you for the extra amount. Unmetered: The host provides you an uplink port with a certain speed (10 Mbps, 20 Mbps, 50 Mbps, etc, etc) and you can use as much bandwidth as that port will allow you to. They don't monitor it, because the port's speed is what caps you in the end. Metered plans do still have a port limit, but it's usually something more standard like 10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, or 1 Gbps. It's also usually a speed that, if fully utilized, will leave you WAY over your bandwidth cap, which is why they cap it in the first place. In my opinion, there is really no time when you "need" one or other type of plan. It all depends on where you can find a better deal and higher quality provider for what you need. As a baseline, a 10 Mbps port running at 100% usage for an entire month can move about 3.3 TB of bandwidth total. Hope this helps.
Lets say I went with a server plan that provided a 10TB Monthly Transfer rate, and a port speed of 100Mbps...does this mean that the maximum speed at which files can be served to clients is 100mbps, and then my maximum traffic allowed is 10Tb???.....Meaning that I have 10Tb to play with and if the 100mbps port ran 24/7 for 30 days then I'd be looking at an overage since it would be over the allowed 10tb?? *Edit* And something else i just stumbled across...private and public network ports?
That's exactly correct. A 100 Mbps port means that the absolute fastest someone could download something from your server would be at that rate, while the maximum amount of data that you can send/receive in a month is 10 TB. Private network ports are used for transfer inside the datacenter. For example, if you had two servers in the same datacenter, you can have a private network port on each so that communication between the two servers doesn't go through the public internet.
I've decided to go with hivelocity.net. Out of all the companies I looked into they seemed to have the best deal with the greatest customer service. I was able to open a live chat session and immediately have any questions answered by a profesional sales agent. Id rather spend a bit more and have awsome support than save $40 and have a staff that doesn't care if my server is down for hours on end because of a fault of their own...