Is bandwidth going to be my most expensive cost if I open up a video hosting site? Is there a inexpensive alternative? Is there an inexpensive web host with low cost bandwidth allocation?
Ive been comparing prices from between montreal bandwidth and toronto bandwidth and i dont see why there is a HUGE difference in price.. Could anyone clear this up for me ?
I am looking to co-locate a server in the toronto area but everything is like $100 for ~160gig of monthly bandwidth.
A major part of web hosts are running linux these days, with congestion control mechanism 2.6 kernel and windows 2008 are now able to get full speed over higher latency even 200+, with the DSL an all major part of countries access to internet has been easy.
Now question is how exactly an expensive carrier such as MCI/ATT can make a difference for a website. expensive i mean by anything over $10 per mbit. Am sure for things like mission critical, financial institutions and for websites who need reach for every corner of 3rd world countries would need the best of the breed bandwidth. ok for the others who is always a regular guy or small business, is the expensive provider worth it? am trying to find out. please write your opinions on cheap/medium/expensive providers worthness of using such.
Internap is whole different as it will make a bandwidth mix superior which bgp can not do.
I will be starting a targeted (niched) video sharing site in the next couple weeks. I know it will require loads of space/bandwidth. My budget is under $450/month.
plan out an effective hosting strategy which will keep the costs low, while giving my providing a fast and reliable viewing experience for my visitors?
Somebody suggested going with Amazon S3 once traffic starts to pick up. But I don't understand how it works. (there is also something called amazon Ec2.. what the heck is the difference )
If I start with say a dual Xeon dedi box, with 2000GB bandwidth, can I serve all my videos/files through amazon while the conversion takes place on the dedicated server? In that case, how would I transfer the files from the dedi box to amazon? Is this even possible?
Could somebody please clarify the whole process? I am expecting about 1000 hits a day within 3 weeks, if they each watch a 200MB video a day... that's a lot of bandwidth!
I've a few arcades sites and they're using more bandwidth than my servers can handle (> 2TB month). I currently have two dedicated boxes.
The sites are static, so they don't require much processing power, just bandwidth (lots of .swf files).
My current host(liquidweb) offered me a 10mb unmetered for 100usd/month, which sounded too much, as I think that I'd be better renting more servers(Or VPSs) and spreading the sites (avoiding single point of failure).
I searched and thought about trying mediatemple grid service, which offers 1TB bw/month.
What do you guys think? Will I be able to use all the BW they promise, ow they will try to kick me off saying that I'm using too much resources(even I hosting only static files)?
I am used to paying costs such as $180 - $250 per month but my local colocation is charging $350 per month just for the bandwidth. Plus it is confusing how they price it they do not have a one set price for the whole month like normal hosts, they charge 1 MB per minute bandwidth average.
I have a website that can be seen in a part of the world but not on the other. How can I troubleshoot this issue. Is there a web utility that can help me figure out what is the problem?
Is security really that critical? If so, why are some of the largest software companies providing such a bad example for the rest of the industry? Why would someone want to target my website? Why is security often overlooked?
These are all common questions that arise on a daily basis within the online industry.
The rest of this article will provide some detailed answers, along with practical examples and true scenarios.
I've spoken with numerous hackers over the past short while. I can't count the number of times I've heard the line "Ignorant site owners deserve to be hacked". In my opinion, that's like claiming that cars without alarms deserve to be stolen, or homes without alarm systems deserve to be burglarized. It's not just wrong - it's illegal.
Security risks and vulnerabilities affect the entire online industry. When a single website is hacked, there are usually multiple other victims. This is most commonly seen with widely distributed software. A potential attacker has the ability to install the software on a test environment, locate the vulnerabilities, then attack random victims even before anyone else is aware of the potential exploits. Once a vulnerability is located, the attacker simply needs to search for other environments using the same software, and within minutes there are hundreds, often thousands of potential victims.
Typically, in the race to market, software providers are encouraged to release their products as soon as the applications are usable. Critical development procedures are often overlooked or intentionally bypassed. One such miss is an application vulnerability assessment. Although the product may be usable, the effects of a vulnerable application could be severe.
Sadly, nobody is "off limits" when it comes to hacking. Most hackers feel safe committing online crime, since the online industry has evolved much faster than the security industry. Many applications are not created with the intent to recognize hacking attempts. Some hackers view their actions as a competition - Who can attack the most valuable website? Who can exploit the most user databases? In many cases, these attacks are bragged about within the hacker's immediate network. The competitive nature of these hacking groups has become so severe, there have been reports of attacks between competing organizations.
You might ask, "If I use industry standards, won't my environment be secure?". The short answer: no, but it helps. Hackers are not restricted by industry standards. Most security companies only implement new standards once at least one victim is reported. This often gives hackers plenty of time to locate other vulnerable environments, and before long, the number of victims can increase rapidly. Hackers are some of the most innovative individuals within the online industry. The most logical way to combat them is to use similar methodology for security purposes.
I am having trouble finding a good sysadmin for my needs. Has anyone else been in a similar situation? Does anyone have any advice on how to find somebody like this?
SITUATION: I am having trouble finding a reliable RH sysadmin. I have a handful of clustered HA setups for customers (6+ servers & load-balancers) and a number of single-server dedicated hosting customers. I do a lot of the work myself. The additional sysadmin usually only has a small amount of actual worked hours per month, dependent on new installs. But, they need to be reliable, available, and familiar with the complexities of the setups.
From what I have seen, some sort of server management company wouldn't be able to be familiar with the setups well enough to not regularly make errors or modify setups correctly due to the amount of clients they have.
I've been shopping for colocation (1U) in South Florida and the prices I've been getting were much higher then if I would just lease a server at a datacenter. I thought you could save alot of money since you are only leasing space and bandwith.
I'd really like to find a Hyper-V VPS provider (or a Xen/ESX provider) and I've been stunned thus far to see each provider charging more for Hyper-V than Virtuozzo (e.g.
VPSland and Crystal Tech.). Why does this surprise me? Well, Hyper-V is included with the OS, whereas Virtuozzo is an extra cost. You might say, "But yeah, Virtuozzo gets around having to have a separate license for each OS install since its actually just one OS." Actually, that's not true, Microsoft clarified their licensing position and said that each instance does need a license. I'm guessing most hosting providers know this...So why the price hike?
is Blue Square now starting to get too expensive for some if not most webhosts that dont already have a large customer base?
I can remember about 6 months or somthing back when rack space would to be around ~£580 for 42u but now its at £700 thats with 8amps and no transit.
Bluesquare is known to be a very good and still is a nice alternative than london, however I think now london has become a cheaper alternative, what do you guys and gals think?
Yes I understand the need to charge more as the data centre fills up to capacity, and to pay for BSQ3-4 which are opening soon etc but im just curious about what do people think etc, im not having a moan they do and still do a brilliant service regardless of price.
I have a small dns cluster with 4 servers, the problem is that when i want to update a dns registry one of them doesnt sync, i have to try like 6 or 8 times to get that server to sync with all the others, and im concern because the one who gets trouble to sync is my secondary dns server
For the last few weeks I have been looking around at various colo and dedi offers here and there because I was thinking of saving some money by colocating a server and I noticed that everyone who offers both colo and dedi have things fixed so that the colo is much more expensive than renting a dedi from the same people in the exact same datacenters!
You would think that since a brand new server costs between $500 and $2500 to build or buy that amortizing of the cost of the hardware would make the dedis more expensive but in fact the opposite is true 90% of the time and only rarely does a host offer a colo plan that even matches their dedi plans. There are exceptions, like FDC for example but most of the time when you sit down and look at the price per mbps and the price per amp the colocation for a standard 8GB/quadcore/500GB server doing 2 TB of bandwidth is more just in monthly rental than if you rented a dedi(that the company owns).
So, in other words if I am renting a dedi with 8GB RAM, Quadcore CPU, 500GB hard drive with 5000 GB bandwidth quota on a 100mbps uplink for $125 to $150 a month and I wanted to save money by swapping it out with my own dedi of the same specs I would right away lose the cost of the dedi and then each month lose even more just in the colo fees along.
So what exactly is going on here? Are hosts overselling their dedis and making losses on a few but profits on most? And then on top of that artificially bloating their colo prices to encourage people to rent dedis instead? Or...do they just bloat colo prices out of fear and expectation that anyone who colos will be blasting their servers to the max and sucking up the mostest amps while using all the bandwidth that they buy?
From reading these boards for a couple years now, I always had the impression that colo was cheapest in Texas or thereabouts, and was priciest in places like NYC. (Of course, I'm referring to relatively comparable service.)
Now I finally have a need for a single server colo (1U). The most-mentioned places in Texas on these boards are cologuys, colo4dallas, etc. Most of them have reasonable rates listed right on their website, around $100-170 for the bandwidth that I need, about 1.5Mbps.
But I've also been requesting quotes from various providers in NYC, who are also popular on these boards. And while there are some in the $200-250 range, which is what I was expecting, there are some that are mentioned highly on these boards (toqen, thenynoc, razorblue, etc.) that are quoting $60-100/month for the same amount of bandwidth.
I.e., not only comparable but in fact *lower* than the Texas colos.
What am I missing here? It's very possible that I'm comparing apples to oranges, cuz I really don't know any of these businesses. Just forming an opinion based on what gets recommended here on a consistent basis.
Some people sent spoofing mails from our mail users sent to our user from Postfix/local that is listed in maillog like below:
Apr 29 16:57:02 ns1 postfix/local[3075]: EC2153565E3: to=<user-mydomain.com@ns1.mydns.com>, orig_to=<user@mydomain.com>, relay=local, delay=486, status=sent (delivered to command: /usr/bin/procmail-wrapper -o -a $DOMAIN -d $LOGNAME)
Bu i do not know how to prevent this people not to use my Postfix/local delivery part. How can i prevent this attack?
When i connect to my mail server to sent or receive my mail it look like Apr 29 17:25:28 ns1 dovecot: pop3-login: Login: user=<user@mydomain.com>, method=PLAIN, rip=***.***.***.***, lip=***.***.***.*** .... Apr 29 17:25:55 ns1 dovecot: POP3(user@mydomain.com): Disconnected: Logged out top=0/0, retr=0/0, del=0/0, size=0....
A few people have asked me to give feedback on my experience with VolumeDrive so I decided I will be posting a 3 part review on them:
Part 1 - initial impressions Part 2 - three month review Part 3 - one year review (hopefully)
------------- When I first got in contact with VD, contact was slow: about an email a day. It was very annoying to say the least. However when VD realized that I was genuinely interested in purchasing a server, and not just a window shopper, contact was more frequent and acceptable.
After looking around and comparing, I ended up ordering the following server from VD for a whopping $105 per month:
Well just at face value, I don't think anyone will argue with me when I say you cannot beat the price. Where else will you find that kind of server w/ full management for $105 a month?
In the ordering process there were a few forgivable annoyances: 1) VD does not have any sort of automated, order online system for their "good" deals. I had to order via email and manually pay from PayPal. I was, however, emailed an invoice confirming my purchase after I paid.
2) It took VD 2 hours to send me my order request after I said "I am ready to purchase". Now it was late at night, so they probably only had a skeleton staff on hand, so this is understandable; however this point is sort of related to the lack of an automated system point mentioned above.
So after I paid and all, I was told they were building me a new server and it would take 3 business days to arrive. I was bummed out upon hearing this but this was understandable and justifiable - if they don't have the parts on hand, they don't have the parts, no big deal. I did appreciate the fact that they were honest with me upfront instead of trying to con me into giving me a different server (like I have been hearing stories about with other hosts).
So I waited. I was told my server would be setup on Tuesday afternoon and it was. The actual time between order and setup was about 5 and a half days: 3 days for the parts to arrive + Saturday + Sunday + time to build the server.
On Tuesday I was informed that my server has a Q8200 instead of a Q6600. To me this was not a big deal so I didn't object but if you are going to order from VD and you want one specific CPU I would be very clear with them that you won't accept any alternative. What did make me chuckle, however, is the fact that I was told "I received a free upgrade" to Q8200. It made me chuckle because I don't consider it a "free upgrade" when I was offered a choice between the Q6600 and a Q8200 for the same price during the ordering process. However, as I already said, a Q6600 or Q8200 - it does not matter to me: both are very similar in performance anyway.
So since I got my server I have been busy setting it up so VD can secure it after I am finished migrating my website (which by the way they just did - I just got an email ).
During that time I have emailed VD a fair amount of times, sometimes asking for clarification and sometimes asking for assistance with a problem, and they have responded back in a more than acceptable time frame and manner.
The only one major problem I have had so far is that initially, and by initially I mean first ~12 hours, it seems the connection to my server was not all the best. Randomly pages would take a while to load; I was curious as to why this was happening so I did some pinging and saw packets were being lost sometimes. This problem seems to have been auto-corrected itself now and I am did email VD about it; hopefully if it happens again we can get it perma-fixed.
Final verdict: people say "you get what you pay for". I say "I got more than I paid for". Hope it continues this way.
Today I'm back to encourage you to stay away from Crissic: I know the prices are tempting, but know that you will have no one on your side when a problem comes up. I finally closed my account with them after numerous major issues with my VPS.
I've had a simultaneous account with Slicehost for the past few months, just to see if paying the extra buck is worth while. Now I know it absolutely is. I'm paying double the price for half the resources with Slicehost, but their service is amazing and reliable, their support is stellar, and peace of mind that the server will stay up and running without load issues, memory or drive failures is worth every penny. The point of this post is not Slicehost though, back to Crissic.
When I signed up for Crissic, I knew that it was a relatively new web hosting startup, but I had no idea it was a one-man show. Yes it's probably possible for a single guy to run a small web hosting company--the problem, particularly in the case of Skylar, is that when something is beyond him, it isn't getting fixed.
A recent support incident occurred where I was suddenly unable to access my VPS via SSH or the console. I contacted support, here are some of his responses to my status inquiries: ....
Are there any web designers/developers who offer hosting to their clients as part of their website creation package. I am toying with the idea of only creating websites for people who host with me. I currently have a colo server, but only use it for personal things. So I have no experience with the needs and demands of clients in regards to hosting. What are some of your experiences with hosting for clients? Is it worth it?
I'm looking for a managed server (mid range specs) and approximately 20TB monthly bandwidth.
I'm looking for reasonably priced hosts, that have a reputation "very similiar" to Rackspace.com. I don't want to quite pay what Rackspace's pricing looks like. So, I'm looking for something slightly cheaper than Rackspcae, but that have a VERY good record for promptness in addressing issues and with proven uptime records.
So far I am considering Verio & The Planet. My knowledge of hosts beyond that is very limited. Please point me in the right direction as to where I can find hosts with SOLID records like Rackspace.com, but are slightly less expensive.
I currently run 16 boxes which I rent from various data centers, mark-up and resell. Conventional wisdom says that it's time for me to start colocating my own servers. I've got approval for capital (loan) so it's no problem for me to just buy these boxes and colo them. But... how the hell does anyone afford it?
I mean, I can get a cabinet in H.E. with 10Mbps burst to 100Mbps for $600/mo (through EGI). Which is an insanely good deal until you realize that it only includes 15amps of power. So (I think) that means that I can really only run about 15 or 20 Celerons at the most. So much for filling up the rack.
Optimistically, if I can run 20 Celerons which I've priced at about $700 each including shipping -- plus a switch, KVM, spare parts and bank interest over 24 months -- that's about $800/mo for the servers plus $600 for the cab, plus about $200/mo for remote hands in case I need the DC guys to do something. I'm looking at about $80/mo per server which I have to pay whether it's rented or not.
I can easily find celerons for $80/mo which include some level of support and I can very easily cancel whenever my client does and buy a fresh new one whenever I get a new client.
I was all excited to go colo -- but the numbers don't add up. What am I missing here? What's the big advantage to all the extra hassle of owning your own?
I wanted a completely fully managed server -- meaning everything is taken care of and I do not have to hire a server admin -- what would be the least expensive pricing from a reputable hosting provided?
This is probably a dumb question, but I've been curious about something. While shopping around for either a cheap dedicated server (less than $75/mo) or a cheap colo for a 1u server, I have noticed that the cheap dedicated servers are often less than a cheap colo, which seems odd to me since with a colo you bring your own machine.
For example, Sago Networks has cheap dedicateds for $50, $59, $79 etc. yet their cheapest colo option is $99. For Sago's $50 dedicated you get 1000GB transfer and 2 IP's, and with their $99 colo you get only get 100 GB transfer and 1 IP.
And Sago is not unusual in this respect. I've priced other providers that fall into this category and they have similar differences.
So why is colo more expensive than dedicated for similar, if not lower, features?