Hello All,

I must have spent hours and hours over the last week trawling the Net looking at various Web Hosting packages. Every time I thought I had found what I was looking for, I looked for reviews, to check peoples experiences, and every time came across comments which made me think that the world is full of scams, rogues and suspicious advertising!

Having said all that let me quickly explain something of what I am looking for. I already author our church website, with an extremely good and reliable Web Host. Unfortunately there is a limit on the disk space they provide, which is lower than that I will need (over time) for another site I want to create.

I am looking for a host that is capable of Streaming Audio, namely church sermons, or book narrations, with a disk space no lower than 1500MB. something lower would be fine for a while, but as the site develops, as you might expect, with sound files being quite large, the space needed will be significant. Again, in time I may need more space, but that is a little ways ahead.

Another problem, is that the host would need to be able to handle RealAudio, MP3 and Windows Media (preferably .wma).

As I am funding this myself, I am not able to pay a fortune.

Despite the unfortunate experiences of many I have read about, the Web Hosting industry must have some genuine, honest, reliable and principled people out there!

So, disk space, price, reliability, integrity, these amongst other things are what I am looking for. Am I looking for a paragon of virtue in today's world. I await any feedback with anticipation, and not a little hope and excitement!

Regards,

Alan

I would say servermatrix myself. They seem stable and good.

check out www.vnpixel.com

they host a few church sites like yours.

(I hope it is ok to bump an old thread)...

Basically looking for the same thing as the AlanF.

But I also am not sure about how to figure out how much bandwidth and data transfer I need per month.

Basically we are looking at encoding our services in MP3 format (32kb) for download (we might look at doing WMA and RealAudio/Video later but not right now). From my estimates of 40 megs per file we'd use about 6 to 7 gigs per year. At the moment we are looking at having about 100 people download our 3 services a week.

We may be keeping our sermons up indefinitely or taking them down after a year or so. But I'd like the ability to expand if need be with out switching hosts (so I am looking at future upgrades).

Currently about the only figure I can decide on for sure is that we'd need is a initial 10 gigs of space with good pricing for expansion.

Also I'm trying to decide if we would need a dedicated server or??? Any general advice and hosting recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Currently we have our website hosted with RCThost (which their hosting has been great so far, we've been with them for 2 + years) but they seem to charge quite a bit for upgrades. https://www.2checkout.com/cgi-bin/buyers/orderpage.2c?sid=41778 (at least for the amount of space we will be needing).

Hi,

It seems to me that a shared hosting environment is not adequate for you, you could consider a reseller package instead, these are usually used for reselling hosting services, and you purchase a reseller plan and split the bandwidth / disk space allocation across your multiple domains. You could in fact just use the reseller package as one plan for your needs, and you can easily obtain 4-15GB of storage and 25-75GB bandwidth so there would be plenty of room for expansion at little cost.

Later on, should you exceed the above allocations you can then consider a dedicated server option, managed would make life easier, and you may require some support from your website users to help fund the server, but if you grow from a reseller plan to a dedicated solution you should have enough of a fan base to support the dedicated server solution.

So really, there is plenty of room for scope with a reseller plan solution. Take a look at some of the member signatures; you should be able to find a perfect solution which may meet your requirements.