I've read on other forums that an arcade site (phparacdescript) could take up 50Gb - 150Gb+ bandwidth a month. Could anyone suggest an affordable host (<$15/m)? Does anyone know how much disk space do I need? I guess the above stats is for an established site with 1k+ unique traffic a day, what would be my minimum hosting requirement for an out of the box phpAS site? Would love to hear from someone who is running an arcade site.
HostGator semi-dedicated is what I use for my games site. It used 190.95 GB bandwidth last month. It is still relatively new, though. I expect that bandwidth usage to double once the site starts ranking well in Google.
thx for the reply, mystik, although $74.95 is out of my starting budget, your reply actually puts arcade site admin into perspective. Judging by how many arcade sites are sold weekly on DD, I would have thought the requirements are slightly lower
Keep in mind that the bandwidth a site uses depends on the traffic / usage of the site. Therefore, the more users a site has, the more bandwidth it will use. The opposite is likewise true. So, all these arcade sites that pop up without promotion likely use little bandwidth.
I found SiteGround (http://www.siteground.com) and ThinkHost (http://www.thinkhost.com), both of which do come below your budget. I really hope this helps!
www.optixdesigns.com offers dedidcated gameservers at affordable price, great performance and located in reliable datacenters in the Netherlands. One of my servers (no game-related) is from them and I have never had downtimes since December when I moved on.
I use dreamhost. Here, use this referral link and save $97 or promotion code DHBEYONDEARTH97. It'll be 9.95$/mo, but when you use the promo code/referral link, it takes it down to about $45/yr! Here's what you get: 1 FREE domain registration www.yourname.com UNLIMITED domains hosted UNLIMITED subdomains 20 GB Disk, 1 TB Transfer 3000 Mailboxes, 75 Shell/FTP Users Ok, you'll notice the 20GB Disk Space and that's fine, because your Disk Space *and* Bandwidth actually GROWS while you use them. Every week of service, you get another 160mb of Disk Space, and 8gb of bandwidth. So yeah, 20gb might not meet that 50gb of what you need (and 20gb should be plenty for a startup arcade), but it grows, and it MORE than handles the amount of bandwidth that you'll need.
rosytoes, hostgator's semi-dedicated is a good plan but if you don't want to spend big amount at this stage, you may also want to check out powweb which offer upto 300 Gigs/Month