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  1. #1
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    Feb 2011
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    Mobile Music App - Need Reliable High Bandwidth Host

    Hey guys. Me and a friend have a dedicated server with godaddy that's currently hosting our music web site for us. The usage on the site is in the area of 1-1.5TB/month. We've now just finished a mobile app for accessing this content and we're expecting the bandwidth usage to go up considerably. Our current plan requires us to pay another $20/month for every half TB.

    Friends I talked to all recommended that I go with S3 or other Cloud options if I had plans to scale this up into something in the tens of TBs (say 20-30TB). I started looking into S3 rates but I'm having a hard time justifying the cost of that compared to some of the high bandwidth dedicated server options that are available out there. For example, I've been looking at the EMBER package from 100TB, and I can get 100TB/month for $200. That's not really cheap but it's still way less than what we would have to pay for 50TBs if we were to go with S3. One thing I'm worried about with these high bandwidth hosting service providers is how they claim this is not "unmetered bandwidth." Does that mean the 100TB is not really a realistic number since they may have some unrealistic cap on the number of concurrent connections?? Maybe I'm not even fully understanding what unmetered bandwidth means.

    Can people please give me some advice on what they think is ideal for my situation and also give me actual recommendations on what hosts to go with? Thank you so much guys.

  2. #2
    I would definitely stay away from S3 / Cloud options for any kind of high bandwidth use. It costs something silly like 10-100 times as much as many of your other options.

    You're only using 1-1.5tb now, so going straight to 100tb won't necessarily be your best plan, but if it costs the same with the same server specs as something with less bandwidth, it wouldn't hurt.

    As far as 100tb.com goes, I have over 10 servers with them pushing 75+tb / mo without any issue. It's not the most "premium" bandwidth, but it does deliver as advertised.

    Unmetered simply means, not metered... as in, they don't measure / bill for your usage. Metered is like an electric meter, they keep track of your usage and you get charged if you go over your allotment. They're just billing / business models, either one can provide good or bad performance depending on the host.
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  3. #3
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    Thank you so much for your response funkywizard. That's exactly what I figured when I saw the price disparity between S3 and some of these plans. Question about the un-metered bandwidth. Are you saying this expression only applies to how the host deals with bandwidth overusage?

    BTW, even 100TB's cloud hosting plans seems may more reasonable than S3 at least as far I can tell. Why do people get so excited about S3. Is there something that I'm missing?

  4. #4
    Quote Originally Posted by kuchu View Post
    Thank you so much for your response funkywizard. That's exactly what I figured when I saw the price disparity between S3 and some of these plans. Question about the un-metered bandwidth. Are you saying this expression only applies to how the host deals with bandwidth overusage?

    BTW, even 100TB's cloud hosting plans seems may more reasonable than S3 at least as far I can tell. Why do people get so excited about S3. Is there something that I'm missing?
    No problem, glad to be helpful. As to unmetered bandwidth, it always means that there is no charge for using "too much". Depending on the host, they may specify an "expected" amount that you will be able to use on their unmetered connection, but it's certainly more common that you'd be expected to be able to use the entire amount 24/7.

    As to the big fuss about amazon's services, or clouds in general, your guess is as good as mine. Anyone with an elementary school education in math and a few minutes of spare time can figure out that it's a pretty bad deal in terms of dollars and cents, except in a very narrow range of situations. But despite that, the entire concept as a business model has seemed to go over really well, from what I've heard, amazon has tens of thousands of servers dedicated to their cloud hosting platform, easily comparable in size to any of the biggest hosting providers out there like softlayer, hetzner, leaseweb, 1&1, hostgator, godaddy, etc. I guess people like the flexibility of it, but boy do you pay for that.

    Even if you only used 2tb of bandwidth for the same price and specs of the servers 100tb is offering (or just about any other dedicated host for that matter), it would be a heck of a deal compared to running the same sites on EC2 / S3. But you have to applaud their ability to capture the share-of-mind to make them one of the most-recommended services even though the price makes it totally inappropriate in almost all cases.
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  5. #5
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    Jan 2011
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    I think according to your requirement Bluehost will be best for your website. They are proving unlimited everything and that also at reliable rate.

  6. #6
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    Thanks again funkywizard. I think I may start out with something smaller and move up to a 100TB when I actually need to.

    humawebdesign, I have a terrible experience with bluehost repeatedly shutting down my site for too many concurrent connections while the logs showed this wasn't in fact true. I even volunteered to go over the logs with one of their support guys but they turned me down. Here is one of many emails I got from them before I made a smart decision and left.

    The account was de-activated by the admin due to high number of connections to the server accessing the MP3 files to down. This was done at 02/09/09 09:35pm (16:35 GMT). That would have been the peak time as caught by the admin and taking immediate action.

    It will be your responsibility to control the number of connections to the server to download. In essence, you can creating a waiting line where you allow 20 or so simultaneous connections to download the MP3 file. When one is done, you let the next one in to connect and download. This is a way to limit connections. We do not offer any scripting support how this is to be done. You can password protect the directories of the MP3 files and give username/password only to those authorized to access it. You can remove the MP3 files. There are ways to control the connections. Otherwise, you can consider getting your own dedicated server (we do not offer this) where you can max out the connections for your own download purpose.

  7. #7
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    Quote Originally Posted by humawebdesign View Post
    I think according to your requirement Bluehost will be best for your website. They are proving unlimited everything and that also at reliable rate.
    That is not good advice.
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  8. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by humawebdesign View Post
    I think according to your requirement Bluehost will be best for your website. They are proving unlimited everything and that also at reliable rate.
    Bluehost has the outward appearance of being unlimited. But once you go past their hidden arbitrary limits, they will shut your site down, cancel your account, and tell you to go find a new host.


  9. #9
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    Feb 2011
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    Quote Originally Posted by CrazyPenguin View Post
    Bluehost has the outward appearance of being unlimited. But once you go past their hidden arbitrary limits, they will shut your site down, cancel your account, and tell you to go find a new host.
    That's precisely what happened to me. They told me openly that I had outgrown the plan I signed up for so it was time for me to find new alternatives. They said I could stay as a customer but they would have to put a throttle on my outgoing traffic... exactly the opposite of what it means to be *unlimited*

    So I take people haven't had similar experiences with companies like 100TB. I'm actually glad someone brought up bluehost because that's exactly the kind of nightmare situation I want to avoid with a new host.

  10. #10
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    Do you have any type of location preference? What type of hardware are you looking for?

  11. #11
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    My location preference would be something that is US based. Not really too picky about where in the US. I'm not sure about what hardware requirements I have. This will be a server used primarily for serving MP3s (no need for processing power because I'm not doing any transcoding or anything). But I supposed I'm still going to need some horsepower just to stream stuff out. I still think the biggest bottleneck may still be the number of concurrent connections.

  12. #12
    100TB also provide custom quotes, and the pricing is very generous. The quote and price was better than the specifications on their website. Contact their sales department.
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  13. #13
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    Quote Originally Posted by humawebdesign View Post
    I think according to your requirement Bluehost will be best for your website. They are proving unlimited everything and that also at reliable rate.
    This is a joke, right?

  14. #14
    If $200 sounds like a good budget, and you need 100TB of bandwidth, the only place you're going to find that while still maintaining quality is going to be 100TB. Most other providers either won't be able to provide a consistent, quality network connection, or they'll be losing a boat load of cash when you actually use your bandwidth.

    Just don't try and run a CDN off your 100TB servers, I hear they aren't big fans of that!
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  15. #15
    Are you planning to stream or allow to download MP3s? Requirements for the servers will be different in each case. Also, if you've built the app for iPhone - I hope that you know about their requirement for HTTP Live streaming standard.

    $20 for.5TB is doable - realistic.
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  16. #16
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    Quote Originally Posted by tulix View Post
    Are you planning to stream or allow to download MP3s? Requirements for the servers will be different in each case. Also, if you've built the app for iPhone - I hope that you know about their requirement for HTTP Live streaming standard.

    $20 for.5TB is doable - realistic.
    I'm not sure what requirements you're speaking of. The app will be be streaming the MP3s with some buffering. So if your connection died, you would hear maybe another few seconds of music before it stops playing.

    Any what do you mean when you say $20 for 0.5TB is "doable - realistic"? That's $40/TB. 100TB is charging under $2/TB.

  17. #17
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    Quote Originally Posted by ServerGurus View Post
    If $200 sounds like a good budget, and you need 100TB of bandwidth, the only place you're going to find that while still maintaining quality is going to be 100TB. Most other providers either won't be able to provide a consistent, quality network connection, or they'll be losing a boat load of cash when you actually use your bandwidth.

    Just don't try and run a CDN off your 100TB servers, I hear they aren't big fans of that!
    Are there not any hosting providers with less extreme plans? I don't know if need 1TB right away. I would rather get started with 10-20TB and work my way up as needed.

    I was also looking at 100TB's cloud hosting solution but I'm still not clear on whether or not that's something where you can just host content or also run actual applications. For instance, would I be able to run apache or tomcat on these instances? Is this like an ec2/s3 hybrid?

  18. #18
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    There's a big difference between unlimited and unmetered. Your best bet is to go with a 10-100mbps unmetered server. Unlimited= impossible.

    100Mbps unmetered will give you a server hooked up to a 100Mbps port, and you can utilize 100% of that 100Mbps (minus overhead of course) 24/7 all month. You won't have to worry about going over an invisible limit on an "unlimited" plan. Then if you start reaching a bottleneck you can just have the cap raised to 1Gbps burstable. That's my opinion anyways
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  19. #19
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    I want to make sure I understand what 1000mpbs means. Does that mean, you can literally download some ~120MB/s between all your connections? If it is, I think that's probably more than sufficient for what I need.

    But I'm equally interested in how much bandwidth each plan comes with. Because I've been in a situation with godaddy in the past where I was paying $40/month for every TB. That's not a scalable solution for us.

    Ideally, we want a cloud instance (maybe dedicated server) that will allow us to stream out anywhere from 10-20TB per month. Can anyone recommend any plans other than 100TB?

  20. #20
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    I was on the phone with 100TB and the guy told me that you have to share the 1Gbps port with other cloud instances. Does anyone have any idea what can kind of download speed I can expect in that sort of arrangement? Is 100mbps realistic?

    Sorry about all the questions...I'm obviously a noob.

  21. #21
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    Is it fair to say that there are no production quality hosts that offer a dedicated server or cloud plan with 10GB transfer or less for under $100? I'm aware of directspace but I don't think they're ideal for a production server.

  22. #22
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    Quote Originally Posted by kuchu View Post
    Is it fair to say that there are no production quality hosts that offer a dedicated server or cloud plan with 10GB transfer or less for under $100? I'm aware of directspace but I don't think they're ideal for a production server.
    I seem to remember 100tb having some form of VPS with 10TB for 90 bucks or so

  23. #23
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    Quote Originally Posted by quantumphysics View Post
    I seem to remember 100tb having some form of VPS with 10TB for 90 bucks or so
    I think you're referring to their $98 cloud plan which includes 10TB. Do you know if there is anything with a little less bandwidth for less. I'm looking for something around the 5TB range ideally! But even 3TB or 4TB with the option to upgrade would work for me.

  24. #24
    There are a lot of VPS providers that are able to provide you with that kind of bandwidth needs, at an affordable price tag. Start poking around Google for things like gbit vps, or 10tb vps, or 5tb vps. You will be able to find plenty of hosts that can meet your bandwidth needs.

    Thanks,
    Anthony

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