Dear fellow DP members, I am currently running a small imagehost in my country, and I host it on a shared server atm. A couple of weeks ago, I got my hands on a short, great domain which is related to images, so I will start a new imagehost very soon and planning to go BIG. (In my country, not worldwide) What I'm looking for is a dedicated server, cheapest possible to start with and then upgrade if ever needed. I've been looking at OVH, since I've used them before for other purposes and was very satisfied. Is OVH a good server for hosting a image upload site? Both frontend and the images uploaded Let's say I would like to start with this one: http://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/kimsufi_4g.xml Good or bad choice? I was thinking, correct me if I'm wrong, since so many OVH servers are used for illegal filesharing, I assume they don't care about adult images/DMCA? Please note that I'm NOT gonna ignore DMCA-requests, but I just don't want OVH to take my server down if they get complaints. So, give me some input please. Never used a dedicated server for website hosting purposes before. By the way, I am aware that OVH currently dont sell any servers.
OVH are actually very strict as far as DMCA/illegality goes. But then, that's the case for any host. There's no reason for hosts to ignore DMCA or notices of copyright violation unless they're shady themselves. But, to answer your question, you'll see OVH taking your server down if DMCA becomes a common deal (whether you deal with it in time or not). They're also rolling out new plans, so I'm not sure whether they'll be changing their bandwidth plans or not, but image hosts tend to use a LOT of bandwidth. Make sure you know what kind of bandwidth allocations they have in place before you jump into host with them. What limits they have, what their fair use policy is, and what kind of bandwidth use they allow or disallow.
Thank you for input. I will have a DMCA page ofcourse, and take actions when I get a request. But to me, it seems a bit strange when OVH are used for seedboxes, which is like 95% warez. If they don't care about that, will they care if a copyrighted image is hosted on my server really? Anyway, in other aspects, is OVH good? The server I linked in my first post, would that be ok to start with?
Seedboxes don't publicly display torrents/data they're seeding/leeching. Image hosts, however, are public. When you start growing, expect to receives tens of automated DMCA notices on a daily basis. I have not hosted with OVH but I've heard of them not being very happy about consistent DMCA notices. And image hosts are a DMCA magnet, so to speak, unless you have complicated systems in place to detect and remove copyright images before they're uploaded/shared. The server you linked, is good enough to start with. The CPU, however, will be your bottleneck as you grow. It also has a single drive, so no protection against failures. If it fails, you lose all your data unless you're running regular backups. When/as you grow, your bottleneck will be, in order of first to last: - Network bandwidth (100mbit can easily get saturated for image hosts that allow hotlinking) - Disk I/O - CPU
Good luck with your host, but if you don't want to have DMCA issues I'll suggest to get hosting in NL at least