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Thread: How to sell disk space to users?
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04-10-2012, 05:23 AM #1Newbie
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How to sell disk space to users?
My website runs on a dedicated server, and our premium membership allows members to store content in our server. I am trying to find a scalable solution that allow allocating disk space, for example, in the cloud, so i don't run out of my server disk space.
Please share your inputs on how this can be accomplished?
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04-10-2012, 07:58 AM #2WHT Addict
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I suppose the easiest way would be to give your premium members FTP accounts on your server with whatever disk space quota you want. Otherwise you could look for a file sharing script somewhere and use that.
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04-10-2012, 08:08 AM #3Junior Guru Wannabe
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I use Amazon S3 for file storage and so for every file which is uploaded via the website I take the file size (saved in bytes), put that to the database and then upload it to S3. Then when the user deleted the file, I tell S3 to delete the file and then subtract the file size from their total.
As for capping the user, have 'packages' or what ever you need and a simple if else statement will decide whether the file should be stored in the cloud or ignored due to them going past their storage quota.
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04-10-2012, 11:37 AM #4Newbie
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That sounds good. Did you mount your Amazon S3 bucket to your local server or using the API?
http://code.google.com/p/s3fs/wiki/FuseOverAmazon
Thanks!
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04-10-2012, 12:48 PM #5Junior Guru Wannabe
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From what I hear the EC2 micro servers aren't especially good, so we're running on a VPS and using the API. I think when we get around the ~1.5GB ram area I'll consider swapping over to EC2.
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04-10-2012, 05:03 PM #6Web Hosting Guru
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04-11-2012, 04:39 PM #7Junior Guru Wannabe
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I suggest you can consider a private cloud solution and store all data on a SAN. You can signup with any cloud storage provider and store your data.
Auto-scale and Integrated billing system cloud servers @ Bodhost
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04-12-2012, 02:51 PM #8Web Hosting Master
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04-12-2012, 07:31 PM #9Web Hosting Master
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I would do this two ways , one by giving out ftp accounts to premium members or get a file upload script and give them access to the script.
You can switch to a bigger server or upgrade or go into cloud web hosting and then it would be much easier to upgrade or add more disk space to your account.
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04-12-2012, 08:18 PM #10Junior Guru Wannabe
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I believe so, but don't take my word for it. And yes, you have to pay for the S3 file download bandwidth, last I saw it was $0.125/GB, though their calculator says $0.13 so I'm assuming that they're rounding up (http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html)
If your premium users are already paying, then is $0.125 really that much? If cost seems an issue, I know that Rackspace Cloud Files is a tiny bit cheaper, somewhere around the $0.11 mark.
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04-13-2012, 12:15 AM #11Web Hosting Master
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One minor advantage is that Rackspace doesn't charge a per-I/O-operation fee. Not a big deal if you don't do a lot of I/O ops, but if you were rsyncing huge trees or something, it could add up.
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04-30-2012, 10:51 PM #12Newbie
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you could do a vps then ftp and do like the other guy said using the ftp quota or use disk manager and ftp and split a drive just for you clients
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05-01-2012, 08:01 AM #13Web Hosting Master
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Does your dedi provider supply Cloud/SAN storage space? That might provide a straightforward alternative to S3. Just make sure your backup/DR plan covers this data as well as your dedi.
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