Webhosting For A Large Art Project? 137
First time accepted submitter heleneleh writes "I'm in a class at school on Electronic Writing and for my final project I'm trying to upload the entire contents of my computer to a webserver that will preserve the directory structure (I plan on using rsync so that it is continually updated as my files change). I need about 500 GB of space, and I'm willing to spend some money, so I was hoping Slashdot could suggest a reliable hosting service for that type of project. Traffic shouldn't be too high, but the storage space and ssh access are key. If there's another way to do this, I'd love to know about it."
I've noticed a lot of VPS providers charge almost nothing for processor time and RAM, but disk is still pretty expensive.
Dreamhost (Score:2, Informative)
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Re:Dreamhost (Score:5, Insightful)
If your ISP gives you grief about a server on your account (I hear that some do)....switch to a business account....it isn't that much more and you can run all the servers you want, no caps, no extra charges. Mines only about $69/mo with Cox Business cable.
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I'm with you cayenne8! Why pay for something that you may not need to pay for.
Also install DynDns on the server so you can always go to you server without remembering your ip address( God when I found this service I was ecstatic, no more remember IP Addresses!!!).
If you are unfamiliar with DynDns it just makes a Dns record for you on their server so when you point your ssh client or browser to yourWebServer.dyndns.org it resolves to your public ip address ex: 170.99.99.123 or whatever you are so you can
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Re:Dreamhost (Score:4, Insightful)
The obvious corollary is that it will take a month to upload all of the files to the server anyway.
Am I missing something here - how does uploading the 500GB contents of your hard drive to a web server qualify as an art project for an electronic writing class?
Frankly this sounds like an insane and poorly-conceived idea, but unless the OP is uploading 500GB of ripped films or porn, nobody is going to bother trying to download all of it, so if it's just to tick a box as part of a school project, I would have thought hosting it on the end of a 2Mbps connection will be a feature.
Re:Dreamhost (Score:4, Informative)
Dreamhost is great! I've been using them for years to host about a dozen different sites. Nothing [i]quite[/i] as big as what the posters is looking for, but they do claim "unlimited space and traffic". If nothing else, their tech support is ridiculously amazing. When you contact them, you actually get someone that you can understand and that knows exactly what they're doing... even in some of the obtuse situations I've put them in. :)
Re:Dreamhost (Score:5, Informative)
I'm probably pushing 1TB of photos on DreamHost. They're maybe 98% uptime but for something like I use it for it really doesn't matter. For what I pay it's great.
Plus one of their employees wrote Ceph [newdream.net]. (A FOSS distributed file system).
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Re:Dreamhost (Score:4, Informative)
without having to sign the rights over to facebook.
And this way you can do crazy things like require a person authenticate themselves before they can see the picture vs someplace like Facebook where every picture is publicly accessible.
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Which reminds me. On top of your 'unlimited' web serving data, they also toss in 50GB that you CAN use to back up anything.
Yes I know their TOC.
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You can use a public-facing web app which requires authentication; then it's no longer a violation of the ToS.
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You use a public-facing app that requires authenthication, Dreamhost even has a one-click-installer for Gallery, which supports extensive access-controls.
It doesn't matter what something "is", only what it does. If you upload all your pictures to a gallery-installation on Dreamhost, they're available for download, should your local computer crash-and-burn.
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Dreamhost is cheap, but reliability and speed are not that good. We have a club that hosts its site, smallish but actively used database that fetches content from another database hourly and member email on it. During last year we had several unannounced short site outages, one mail outage that ended up losing day worth of mail randomly (small amount of mail went through, rest got lost) and one maintenance that they announced only a couple of hours before actual maintenance.
There is also an issue of speed,
WHT Forum (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ - This would be a good site to review.
Re:WHT Forum (Score:5, Informative)
This.
If you have the patience to read reviews for a half hour or so, you will hear all the pros and cons of any given hosting company. On top of that, they often post exclusive deals in that forum which can be quite a bargain. It is *THE* go-to for hosting discussion. Very highly recommended!
Or you could go the no-brainer route and get a cheap dedicated server from a place like Leaseweb. I've been with them for years, and I think they have US-based "bargain servers" starting around $80 or so, but that's entirely self-managed, so you need to know enough to set up your own Apache/SQL stack on CentOS or Ubuntu or whatever the kids are using these days. Like I said, I've been there for 5+ years, their service used to be ass back then but now it's top-notch, and the price is hard to beat for what you're getting. Traffic is cheap there too, heck you can get 100mb unmetered for under 2 bills if you don't mind slightly boring hardware.
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In that case, he could just rent space from an actual rsync backup provider.
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VPS for server, storage for storage (Score:2, Insightful)
Get a bog standard VPS to do the hosting, storage on S3/other cloud storage provider - probably the cheapest way of doing it.
Re:VPS for server, storage for storage (Score:4, Informative)
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Transfer in is currently free as a promotion, but yeah transfer out is pricey. Just storing the data is also fairly pricey compared to low-end shared-hosting options. For example, you could throw up that 500 gigs on a $9/mo Dreamhost account, but it'd cost you $50/mo of S3 storage space even under the reduced-reliability storage option (or $70/mo under the regular one). S3 has much better performance, but it doesn't sound like that's a major consideration here.
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Transfer in is currently free as a promotion, but yeah transfer out is pricey.
For what it's worth, I don't think free inbound transfer is a promotion. If it is, it sure isn't presented that way on their pricing page [amazon.com].
Obviously that doesn't change the fact that outbound transfer is on the expensive side.
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You're right, it looks like I'm misremembering from a while ago, and they made it permanent. Googling around, it looks like, back when they first introduced the free inbound transfer in 2009, it was billed as a promotion good through June 2010, but then they just kept it.
Bluehost or Hostmonster (Score:1)
http://www.bluehost.com/
http://www.hostmonster.com/
Unlimited space and SSH Access enabled. Low price. I'm use to backup with rsync my files.
Cons:
The server can to be with high load.
Greetings from Paraguay
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Seconded. Support is terrible, my mysql databases got corrupted several times a month because server crashes or shutdown, and they warned me that my account could be syspended because I was hosting a collection of about 30k images (all photographs made by me and others for our website, mind you). There you go with their "unlimited" plan.
I still have an account with them, but just because I couldn't find the time to fully migrate over to a new host. Now I use Slicehost and couldn't be happier. At least they
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I agree, I've been with them for years and they have a very good service. Twice I tried different hosts (more expensive), I even tried Google App commercial offering (which I hated) but I always went back to Bluehost.
Pros:
-uptime
-service
-performance
-the whole package (features, SimpleScript library, etc.)
-clear billing, no scam
-no annoying upsell campaigns (excep the Postini ad when you first access the CPanel)
-their IPs are not on spam blacklists
Cons:
-restrictions for photo/video content
-shared databases a
600 gigs storage, $5.83/month (Score:2)
Before they made the split, you could have signed up for the 10-year deal for as low as $1.67/month.
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I've been using them for a few years now ... and iweb isn't about to disappear any time soon.
This is just their way of getting attention for their bread and butter - some very nice servers+bandwidth at a very nice price.
Re:600 gigs storage, $5.83/month (Score:4, Informative)
This was not a great question (Score:5, Insightful)
You might have asked us what the best sports team is, frankly.
I want to see some Ask Slashdot questions with some depth. The focus on breadth is eating Pez candies day after day, and my teeth are rotten and I want a meal.
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You've never owned a Ferrari.
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I Pwned a Ferrari, does that count?
(Saw it passing me with a not very young couple. I saw the look of the wife and thought "dear husband, that woman there is not gonna let you speed up one bit". Turns out I was right)
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Yeah, that happens a lot.
When I drove Stan's 365, since he'd lost his license, I got some encouragement to open it up on the Internstate. No time at all we had a '76 Trans Am trying to engage us. It's not that we were doing 90 in second gear, but the mullet in the screamin eagle was dodging traffic to stay in front of us, and doing very well for about 20 miles, until we happened on the downhill straight coming into Newport. traffic opened up, and he didn't block us quick enough to make me stop. 130 in t
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But some slashdotter might sidestep the whole issue and reply:
BIIIG storage, Small traffic? why not getting a business dsl and host everything on a laptop under linux or a linux vm if you really really can't?
Pro: no upload times.
Contra: no remote backups, needs a bit of admin / network skills, possibly less uptime.
Couple of questions (Score:3)
a) What the heck is Electronic Writing that it needs a course separate from "regular" writing?
b) 500GB of words is 55 metric arse-loads. What are you not telling us?
Anyway, why aren't you backing the data up to a local USB drive?
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I don't know about the submitters case, but one case I'm familiar with, is one of my friends teaches Electronic Writing. The idea is that people tend to expect/use different standards in online publications (compare similar topics in a blog to other sources. They tend to expect more pictures, in particular, but paragraph separation and other factors come in. Apparently a less formal standard of writing is also allowed.
Sorry I can't give you more details, that's about all I got from her.
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1) More pictures?
2) paragraph separation????
3) a less formal standard of writing?
Are you sure this isn't a workshop on writing children's stories?
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Yeah, I don't know... It seems to me that if you had a college with lots of writing courses, and you could take a semester that focused on the nuances of writing for online media, that wouldn't be too unreasonable. It might be interesting to pick apart and think about how blogs posts, as a medium, are different from other kinds of short articles. As someone who has done some different kinds of writing, sometimes professionally, it *is* interesting how different media demand subtly different rules of writi
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However, I have a hard time imaging that studying the writing of blog posts would warrant more than a semester, unless you were at the level of getting a PhD doing research into how the Internet is changing the conventions of writing.
For instance, relying on your audience to copyedit your misspellings in their heads and the shocking number of cases where such things don't even get noticed by your readers (i.e. imaging versus imagining).
Re:Couple of questions (Score:5, Insightful)
From the summary ("I'm trying to upload the entire contents of my computer to a webserver that will preserve the directory structure") it's some stupid "performance art".
500 gigabytes (5 terabits). Assuming a consumer 10mb down/1mb uplink, it would take (not counting protocol overhead) 1,389 hours (58 days) for the initial upload, by which time we can assume at least some of the data has changed.
Not to mention that if the author has a non-free OS or applications on that computer, they'll be violating plenty of copyrights.
Bottom line: AGH (Ain't Gonna Happen).
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Dear Tom/Barbara: Ain't gonna happen, assuming your assumptions. I have a 100 Mb uplink, and still remember being happy when hard drives became fast enough for me to utilise that. I realise this is unusual for a home connection in most places of the world, but the poster may very well be trying to upload from his campus. I don't know how universities are connected to the net in the US or wherever else the poster may be from, but I'm guessing he (like me) could upload 50
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This is an art student looking for a cheap solution - this is not someone who has the $$$ to spend on an 100mb uplink. Otherwise, they'd just host it directly off their own machine, as others have proposed.
Your proposed loophole - that maybe they have access to a uni account with gobs of bandwidth, but unis now have safeguards in place for bandwidth hogs, same as everyone else. Saturating a 100mb/s uplink for any period of time will get your account first throttled, then blocked - and that's assuming that
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As a further follow-up - you completely ignored the copyrights question. They want to mirror their whole computer drive, which would of necessity include the OS.
On top of that, most "all you can eat" web hosting agreements don't allow you to use the account for "online backup" purposes - the files have to be part of a functioning website, and certain filetypes are banned (such as executables).
Now, if the poster DID have a 100mpbs connection, as you "pulled out of the air" to make your case, they still c
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Not me ... but nice try :-)
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b) 500GB of words is 55 metric arse-loads. What are you not telling us?
Maybe using PDFs and wants to backup Adobe Reader with it.
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>> b) 500GB of words is 55 metric arse-loads. What are you not telling us?
It's ASCII porn?
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"Regular" writing is the day to day stuff that people need to write - you know, memos, letters, that sort of thing.
"Electronic" writing is probably more known as Technical writing, which is a subfield to writing compliant papers (e.g., to submit to IEEE and other journals), as well as online documentation and printed technical documentation (user manuals, service manuals, etc).
Instructions are particularly important a
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Ah, Tech Writing. Thanks.
Old-line tech companies (well, that-which-was-DEC did, at least) have been creating tech documentation using computers for 30 years, though.
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I used to host large art projects... (Score:1)
...then I took an arrow to the knee.
Consider using a CDN (Score:3, Informative)
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You should consider using a Cloud CDN like Rackspace CloudFiles or Amazon S3. They're designed purely for cheap, efficient and fast storage and delivery. While you can't SSH into one, you can certainly set up rsync without incident and the data can be called from a site hosted anywhere.
You can run an EC2 instance and mount S3 storage as NFS thus you can ssh into it and run anything on top of it using your favorite AMI (amazon machine image) available for nearly every mjaor OS :)
EC2 is the way forward!
Techark (Score:1)
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No comment on their quality, but their advertised packages don't come close to meeting the very basic requirements of the post.
10 Gig disk space + 150 Gig bandwidth @ $8.95/mo
40 Gig disk space + 300 Gid bandwidth @ $25.95/mo
Dedicated server with 500 Gig disk and 10 Mbps unmetered bandwidth @ $115.95/mo
Sorry, but how's he supposed to get 500 Gig of data up on any of those? Even the dedicated server lacks enough space (OS will chew some up).
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HostMonster - unlimited space and bandwidth (Score:1)
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If your rsync source/destination is of the format username@hostname:/path/to/files it uses SSH by default.
Dedicated server... (Score:1)
At current VPS prices you'd bleed yourself through the nose for enough disk space. The first VPS plan from Linode with that much disk space is $480 a month, whereas you can get a Softlayer dedicated server with a 500GB drive for ~$200 a month.
If it supports directory hierarchy preservation (haven't tried), the cheapest alternative is Amazon S3, which is something like $70 a month for 500GB ($0.14/GB) of space, and another $20 or so per month for an EC2 instance to serve it from. There's at least one FUSE im
Unlimited spaces != unlimited files (Score:2, Interesting)
Many hosting services who offer "unlimited space" have other limitations you need to know about so you don't find out in the middle of transferring files that you can't do what you want to do. There are limitations on the number of inodes you can store, which for your purposes would mean the number of files you can store. So if the limit is, for instance, 50,000, then after you have uploaded that many files, you won't be able to upload any more no matter how much space you have left. The other limit I have
modwest (Score:3)
I've been very happy with http://www.modwest.com over the last 10+ years. Their basic plan is $7/month, but have more expensive plans if you need it. They have unlimited(within reason of course) because they know that only a small percentage of users come close to any limits they would set.
If it's only for your class (Score:4, Informative)
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Sounds good, DynDNS + port forwarding on your home router to a machine/VM running the hosting service = problem solved.
Something is wrong here (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't mean to be rude, but it seems like you may be approaching this the wrong way. What are you actually doing and why? Why are you looking a VPS providers? You say, "I was hoping Slashdot could suggest a reliable hosting service for that type of project." What type of project? Define "reliable".
To be more specific, why are you trying to upload the entire contents of your hard drive to a web server? Like, if this is a writing project, do you care about copying your program/system files, and if so, why? Why a web server? Is it going to be accessed by someone else? If so, who needs to access it, and where are those people located relative to you (e.g. are they on the same network?)?
If you just need 500 GB of web space, there are lots of shared hosting companies that will provide that much space for less than $10 per month. It will be reliable enough for a lot of purposes. However, not knowing what you're trying to do, I don't know if you're doing something completely silly.
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I read the question as, "Hi. Real online backup sites are expensive. I want to backup my drive on one of the cheap 'unlimited storage' web hosts, but none of them allow wholesale backup. So, I'm going to call this an 'art project' and claim that it's not a backup, but a legitimate functioning web site. What hosting companies are dumb enough to fall for it?"
Maybe I'm just a philistine, but I really can't imagine how a live copy of someone's hard drive can be considered "art".
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Maybe I'm just a philistine, but I really can't imagine how a live copy of someone's hard drive can be considered "art".
Well I can't imagine how a lot of modern art is considered art, but it is. If he really just wants a backup, why not ask? It's not as though we're going to turn him in. And yes, basically hosting companies are dumb enough to fall for it, but it probably won't be a great backup solution.
What about your house? (Score:1)
If it's not high traffic, your ISP will not call TOS violation, and with speeds nowadays, high traffic means pretty high so it depends, you'd have to get the details that are local to your area.
But I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this, or maybe i just didn't read it... but what you do is register a domain and point it at your home IP, set up a web server at home, open port 80 on your router. There are a million factors to consider here, but one less obvious one is you are probably not a high profile tar
Just cuz they have the coolest looking equipment.. (Score:1)
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These guys are supposed to be the cheapest in dollars-for-gigs, don't know if anyone's overtaken them. They also claim to offer true encryption, in which only the user has the key.
knows rsync, ssh, and VPS, but... (Score:1)
can't answer his/her own question? That doesn't compute.
initial upload (Score:2, Insightful)
You realize of course that even with reasonably good upload speeds (> 5Mb) its going to take over a solid week to upload 500GB and your ISP will probably cut you off for abusing the system. For that much data you need a service with provisions to handle you sending a disk, so all you do over the internet is deltas.
You often get what you pay for... (Score:2)
I've noticed a lot of VPS providers charge almost nothing for processor time and RAM, but disk is still pretty expensive.
A cheap VPS provider will have "fair use" policies, officially or otherwise (in fact any VPS provider, though good ones are more likely to have well documented policies so you know what standard you are to be judged against). If your VM uses too much CPU time you will find it disabled without warning until you beg to have it turned back on again. The same goes for if you create a lot of I/O activity (i.e. any heavy database work).
You don't have to break your quotas either: I've have a cheap VPS provider
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Do you know ... ? (Score:5, Funny)
But all of them have something in common: they need SPECIFICS, they need to know EVERYTHING, they are paranoiac, they are whiners and they hate non-sense !
Examples :
Do you really expected to get any valuable answers with your non-specific question ? yeah... be sorry.
To answer to your question anyway, I need to know what kind of movies are you trying to upload illegally ?
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It's amazing to see the edges of the common Slashdotter's knowledge set, and appurtenantly his or her worldview. By 'Electric Writing', I am guessing the poster is referring to the discourse surrounding textuality and inscription in the age of mechanical and digital reproduction (Benjamin, anybody?), and more specifically highly influential thinkers like Friedrich Kittler ('the is no more writing') Greg Ullmer (electracy, or Arthurt Kroker)? This stuff isn't necessarily related to art in the traditional s
No vps (Score:2)
VPS won't be good enough for your needs - most VPSes share the disk space (a raid 5 is shared between 8-16 vps machines so they can't give you lots of space).
Talk to various companies advertising budget servers on Web Hosting Talk forums.
You should be able to rent an Atom based server or an older generation server they wouldn't otherwise be able to rent for about 40-50$ a month and some of the companies will even accept to physically mail them a hard drive and install it in your server for a few extra dolla
AWS S3 (Score:2)
http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ [amazon.com]
For 500GB you are looking at 46.50 or $70 a month for storage alone. I'd think the transfer costs (HTTP traffic) would be pennies based on the traffic patterns described.
You won't be able to use rsync ... but I'd guess there are solutions our there that allow mirror like functionality you describe.
Enterhost (Score:1)
Enterhost, been using them for over 8 years. Great service and a lot of bandwidth
Host yourself (Score:3)
Based on the description I don't see why hosting it yourself isn't an option. If you literally have 500 gigs of data get two 1TB drives and build a NAS with the two drives mirrored. For OS you could use either a Linux server with LVM/RAID or a FreeNAS set up with ZFS. You could even virtualize it if you wanted to get fancy (easy to switch physical hardware used if nothing else). Open a port on your router and hand out the IP or setup a DynDNS sort of deal for others to access. You also want a separate USB hard drive to back the data up.
For the amount of money it would take to host all this data the Linux/FreeNAS solution would be much, much cheaper (less than $400US). Also, ridiculously easy to setup an SSH daemon on linux/FrreeBSD.
You sound like you're at some kind of college or university so I assume it wouldn't be too difficult to bribe a local computer scientist with mountain due and pizza to help you out as needed.
Fishy (Score:1)
I know I sound paranoid, but to me it sounds like the submitter is trying to monitor the comings-and-goings of someone else's computer.
Pair Networks = reliable, but you're on your own (Score:2)
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Kimsufi (Score:2)
InMotion (Score:2)
I and other people who used to use them highly do not recommend them
Start with these : http://blog.sucuri.net/2011/09/mass-compromise-at-inmotionhosting-com.html [sucuri.net]
http://thehackernews.com/2011/09/inmotion-hosting-server-and-trinity-fm.html [thehackernews.com]
They messed up the cleanup, damaging sites that had already cleaned up by themselves.
Last but not least: http://www.windows8update.com/2011/11/17/top-10-reasons-that-i-dont-use-inmotion-hosting-for-my-we [windows8update.com]
Universtiy may host it. (Score:2)
laptop + xampp + external hard drive (Score:2)
take your project to school to demonstrate it, don't put (and keep) a copy of your entire hdd online. that's just pointless.
hosting that much data for a one-off project not intended to remain online is a lot of wasted bits transferred and a lot of wasted time/effort.
also consider upload times for 500gb data....
384k upstream = 126 days, 10m upstream = 5 days
might be able to half those using a transfer scheme with compression, but still, that's a hell of a long time.
(and don't forget about any usage caps enfo
EC2 + S3 (Score:2)
You can just use Amazon S3 Storage. .10 per GB would mean $50 per month for 500 GB.
If you use EC2 for a simple virtual server you can mount the S3 volume onto your virtual server.
If you are like me and prefer rackspace virtual servers, then you can still mount the S3 volume with something like jungle disk.
You can then use something like Jungledisk to mount it as a volume on both machines, server and source machine.
Rackspace has basic virtual servers for like $10 a month.
So $10 for basic virtual server. $50
Why not MiracleData(tm)? (Score:2)
Amazon. (Score:2)
The Amazon EC/AWS has a lot of options. You can start hosting at little cost and nearly unlimited scaling at no infrastructure cost.
AWS Cloudfront should handle any peak you can produce (as long as you dont do your thing right before christmas....) and the pricing seems ok.
Go Dedicated (Score:2)
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Just an update on what some of my research has led me to, hopefully to help someone else or further discussion