Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : Is there such a thing as a content cache, like SimpleCDN but not so sophisticated?

[temporalillusion]

I have a site where our budget is very constrained, and we're maxing out our unmetered pipe. The majority of the bandwidth is taken up by an active forum.

I offloaded most of the static content (images, .js, .css files) to a CDN (SimpleCDN) which I've been pretty happy with, the costs are very reasonable and fit within our limited budget.

They offered a service where if the content was not found on their network, it would check on our server for the file, retrieve it, and then serve it up from then on. Which was perfect for us as it allows us to use the CDN to serve image files uploaded by users in such a way that it's transparent to the end user.

However they're discontinuing this service, and though they're offering a similar service (based on rsync), they're charging $150 setup fee! So basically I have to pay $150 to keep using the service I've been using for a while. Which I can't really do.

So I'm trying to think of alternatives. I don't think I really need a full bore CDN, while we do have users from around the world, it's not a business site so a few ms isn't going to be the end of the world.

I just need a file hosting solution that has decent performance and fairly inexpensive bandwidth.

It's only 100-200GB / month maybe. At SimpleCDN that was only costing $8 / month.

I looked at Amazon, but they charge 1 cent for 10,000 requests which for us adds up very fast.

I'd almost think of just signing up for a Dreamhost account, but I would think using them to host just our images probably goes against their ToS.

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

[DJSlim]

give this a look

http://www.blueturbo.com/file-hosting.php

On my blog I use steadyoffload

http://steadyoffload.com

[temporalillusion]

Thanks! Yeah I found blueturbo and they look good, though a little more expensive than I'd like at this point.

What's steadyoffload's prices?

[DJSlim]

Originally Posted by temporalillusion

Thanks! Yeah I found blueturbo and they look good, though a little more expensive than I'd like at this point.

What's steadyoffload's prices?

5GB $4.34
50GB $19.80
100GB $32.62

but this isn't monthly. you buy bandwidth. when it is gone you buy more. if you buy 100GB and it lasts a year then it is ok

[01globalnet]

The gridlayer dynavolt could be a good solution - or you can take two cheap hosting accounts from the big boys and do round robin for the static content.

[Ryan Williams]

Rackspace recently positioned themselves in this market, which I'm thinking about moving to as I'm in a similar situation with SimpleCDN. See here:

http://www.mosso.com/cloudfiles.jsp

What I find most enticing about this is that they're piggybacking the Limelight network, which is pretty well known and has excellent worldwide connectivity — significantly better than SimpleCDN's.

Using something like Dreamhost is workable, although their TOS does prohibit this I believe (even if rarely enforced), and also Dreamhost's servers are localised which means people overseas won't enjoy lightning-fast downloads of your static content like they do with a CDN.

Indeed, that's why I started using a CDN even though my host gives me plentiful bandwidth — I use it to serve my videos, so people in Europe can get maxed-out download speeds rather than 300–700kB/s. For example I max out my 2200kB/s download speed when using SimpleCDN, as opposed to about 500kB/s for my US-based host. Fine for images, but not so much for videos.

[temporalillusion]

Yeah I saw the mosso one, they have a 1 cent per 500 requests charge for files under 250kb, which would be all the files I have, so the monthly cost for us would be $400 or more

Thanks for the additional options though guys, appreciated!