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Webhosting For A Large Art Project? 137

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the disk-ain't-cheap dept.
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.
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Webhosting For A Large Art Project? More

Webhosting For A Large Art Project?

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  • Dreamhost (Score:2, Informative)

    by epdp14 ( 1318641 ) *
    I use dream host... "unlimited space and traffic" they really mean don't go crazy and try to host a google.com mirror off of it. Its pretty cheap, I pay $8 a month. You can run cron jobs, mysql databases, etc. I've been happy with it. I know it is karma/referral whoring but you can use my referral code and get a free domain registration: FOLLOWTHEHORIZON (if you already have a domain just use DREAMBUCKS for $50 off your first year). http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?303747 [dreamhost.com]
    • I wanted to come pitch in with my datacenter providers, but seems like he didn't need such. However, I still suggest you try FDCServers [fdcservers.net], if you have any kind of need for traffic for your art projects. If not, there are multiple cloud backup providers which should suit your need.

    • Re:Dreamhost (Score:4, Informative)

      by morari ( 1080535 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2011 @11:35AM (#38291968) Journal

      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)

        by 0100010001010011 ( 652467 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2011 @11:39AM (#38292040)

        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).

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by epdp14 ( 1318641 ) *
          I have around 1.5TB of photos and home movies on DH as a web-backup and to share with family without having to sign the rights over to facebook.
    • I used Dreamhost for something similar to the requesters needs, but was informed that the 500GB did not include the storage of any "media"files and had to move to another provider at pretty short notice. Would not recommend!

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      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)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07, 2011 @11:25AM (#38291818)

    http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ - This would be a good site to review.

    • Re:WHT Forum (Score:5, Informative)

      by billcopc ( 196330 ) <vrillco@yahoo.com> on Wednesday December 07, 2011 @11:36AM (#38291994) Homepage

      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.

      • But does he need a dedicated server? Even $80/month seems a little steep if all he needs is 500GB of web space to rsync some files to.

        • In that case, he could just rent space from an actual rsync backup provider.

          • Maybe. The requirements are unclear, so it's hard to come up with a solution. He mentioned that he wanted it to be a web server, but who knows if that's because it actually needs to be publicly available via http?

  • VPS for server, storage for storage (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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)

      by InsightIn140Bytes ( 2522112 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2011 @11:26AM (#38291846)
      Uh, transfer in and out of S3 is really costly. It's one of the reasons I didn't change my servers there. I would have for processing power and everything else, but the bandwidth is extremely costly.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Trepidity ( 597 )

        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.

        • 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.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Trepidity ( 597 )

            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.

  • 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

  • cheap enough [funio.com] - owned by iweb [iweb.com].

    Before they made the split, you could have signed up for the 10-year deal for as low as $1.67/month.

    • I must warn you. These $1-2 a month providers are huge crap. They have large downtime, huge abuse amounts, and sometimes they just disappear. But yeah, what can you expect for a few dollars a month. Less than what you would eat at McDonalds. If you want any kind of guarantee for your data, avoid them.

      • 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)

        by sandytaru ( 1158959 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2011 @12:18PM (#38292562) Journal
        I switched from a $15/month host to a $3/month host (Maiahost.) The previous host was unreliable, had frequent downtime, and was running on some fairly archaic web technology. (At one point, they lost ALL my data with no local backups. That was the last straw; I ran my own backups once a week but that was still a few days of SQL data totally gone.) When I switched, I've had access to instant tech support, 0 unplanned downtime so far, and a library of amazing CMS systems that they're happy to help me implement at no additional cost. Love them to bits. The marketplace for hosting is very competative now, and the overpriced unreliable ones are going to fail eventually.

  • This was not a great question (Score:5, Insightful)

    by digitalsushi ( 137809 ) <slashdot@digitalsushi.com> on Wednesday December 07, 2011 @11:28AM (#38291862) Journal

    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.

    • He might as well have asked us what the best thing is.

    • 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)

    by Nutria ( 679911 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2011 @11:28AM (#38291872)

    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?

    • 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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Nutria ( 679911 )

        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?

        • 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

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by rwv ( 1636355 )

            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)

          by tomhudson ( 43916 ) <barbara@hudson.barbara-hudson@com> on Wednesday December 07, 2011 @01:02PM (#38293064) Journal

          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).

          • Bottom line: AGH (Ain't Gonna Happen).

            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

            • 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

              • Ok, thanks for the info. I'm assuming you are talking about the US, which is obviously very different in terms of both pricing and policy. I still don't know where the poster is from, though (statistically, the US).

            • 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

            • Also, what is this "millibit" you speak of?

              Not me ... but nice try :-)

    • That's a couple of two page docx files. Haven't you used the latest version of word?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ifrag ( 984323 )

      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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      >> b) 500GB of words is 55 metric arse-loads. What are you not telling us?

      It's ASCII porn?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      What the heck is Electronic Writing that it needs a course separate from "regular" writing?

      "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

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Nutria ( 679911 )

        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.

    • Everything is written, freehand, by in Microsoft Paint, with a large purple crayon font. The files are then saved in uncompressed .BMP files. That is why this Electronic Writing takes so much room.

  • I used to host large art projects... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    ...then I took an arrow to the knee.

  • Consider using a CDN (Score:3, Informative)

    by firegate ( 134408 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2011 @11:31AM (#38291906) Homepage
    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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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!

  • I've used Techark for years ( http://www.techark.com/ [techark.com] ). They've been reliable. Nice folks too.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by unrtst ( 777550 )

      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).

      • I'd recommend contacting them about the specific requirements. I've been using them for years, found them to be reliable with actual people running the show instead of automated drones. And believe me, I've been through quite a few hosts before these folks.
  • Everyone has their own hosting provider that they prefer. Mine is HostMonster. Hard to argue with unlimited space and bandwidth. Haven't had any issues with uptime in the year I've been hosting with them. They allow SSH access to their hosts (but you have to provide an image of a your drivers license/state ID). Haven't tried to rsync to my server, but then again, I've never had issues using rsync provided I was doing it over ssh (e.g. `rsyc -a -v -e 'ssh -l username' /local/dir hostname:/remote/dir` #going

    • If your rsync source/destination is of the format username@hostname:/path/to/files it uses SSH by default.

  • Dedicated server... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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)

    by jd142 ( 129673 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2011 @11:37AM (#38292018) Homepage

    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)

    by denshao2 ( 1515775 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2011 @11:43AM (#38292090) Homepage Journal
    I would host it at home. If it's only for a professor to see, you should not be getting a lot of traffic. Just keep it on a machine that is separate from anything important.

    • 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)

    by nine-times ( 778537 ) <nine.times@gmail.com> on Wednesday December 07, 2011 @11:49AM (#38292174) Homepage

    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.

    • 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".

      • 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.

  • 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

  • http://www.backblaze.com/ [backblaze.com] - I always wanted to build one of those 200TB units for $8k too

    • 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)

    by Anonymous Coward

    can't answer his/her own question? That doesn't compute.

  • initial upload (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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.

  • 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

    • Actually, cancel the Amazon mention: yout 500Gb isn't going to fit on the free tier by a long shot...

  • Do you know ... ? (Score:5, Funny)

    by heatseeker_around ( 1246024 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2011 @12:29PM (#38292672)
    I assume that you know you posted your question on slashdot . So I can assume you know it is a cave full of nerds and geeks all over the place. Some are staring at you from the the ceiling, others are cowardly anonymous and invisible, some also pretend not to be nerds by referring to nerds as "they", "them", "the nerds"... hum...
    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 :
    • - You say, "I was hoping Slashdot could suggest a reliable hosting service for that type of project." What type of project? Define "reliable". (nerd 778537)
    • - To be more specific, why are you trying to upload the entire contents of your hard drive to a web server? (nerd 778537)
    • - What the heck is Electronic Writing that it needs a course separate from "regular" writing? (nerd 679911)
    • - 500GB of words is 55 metric arse-loads. What are you not telling us? (nerd 679911)
    • - You might have asked us what the best sports team is, frankly. (nerd 137809)

    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 ?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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

  • 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

  • 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, been using them for over 8 years. Great service and a lot of bandwidth

  • Host yourself (Score:3)

    by keith_nt4 ( 612247 ) on Wednesday December 07, 2011 @12:52PM (#38292934) Homepage Journal

    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.

  • 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.

  • I've been using Pair Networks [pair.com] for about 15 years. They have the tools and space you need, and you can exactly mirror your present directory structure. It's either shared hosting (some 'dangerous' tools are limited) or your can lease a server. They have high reliability, near zero downtime, a software/hardware maintenance schedule (no surprises). It's FreeBSD Unix and they won't hold your hand with automated tools, so you're on your own.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kalvos ( 137750 )
      Also, Pair is amenable to special circumstances, such as high storage / low volume, nonprofits, etc. Use their homepage as a guide, and then email to ask. They answer.
    • It's been a long long time that I haven't seen any host asking for a SETUP FEE for a VPS. That's a sign that they must be doing the setup manually, which means you should avoid them (you want to be able to reinstall your OS yourself, that's one of the very basic features any decent host will have).
  • I think this should be EXACTLY what you're looking for: http://www.kimsufi.co.uk/ [kimsufi.co.uk] I've personally had a server with them for about 2 years with no major issues. For the money, it's phenomenal value.
  • InMotionHosting offers tons of disk space for a very low price.
    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]
  • Talk with your professor first about having the University host it. Your school will have the infrastrure to host this themselves. They may have dedicated space for students. You may need to get an exception to host that much data. This is what your tuition should be paying for.

  • 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

  • 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

  • Hi folks, Dan from MiracleData(tm) here! I thought I'd take advantage of Slashdot's new AskSlashdot sponsorship feature to throw in my two cents worth, and recommend to you our own line of MiracleServers(tm)! While I am the chairman and CEO of MiracleData(tm), I don't want you to think I'm biased in any way when I say - without fear of contradiction, since I now control the moderation on this thread - that MiracleData(tm) is the greatest service to mankind since the invention of modern medicine! No, that

  • 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.

  • Don't bother with a VPS for this sort of thing. Just buy a dedicated server. You can get one for fairly cheap compared to the specs on a VPS when you want to go that high with HDD space. A good service for this is serverpronto.com [serverpronto.com].

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