Hello everyone. I am starting website similar to myspace for music bands to upload their music for everyone to listen (it will be very similar to myspace profile page). I am expecting large amount of music requests with very large traffic on the website. I currently own server with:
# 100GB RAID-10 Disk Space
# 2000GB Premium Transfer
I am afraid this will not be enough. I have been advised to use Amazon Simple Storage Service for all mp3’s uploaded from my web site. Through simple API music player will pull mp3 files from remote server location specializing in these kind of services.
What are your suggestions? Is there a Amazon Cloud alternative since prices are not so great. Thank you in advance.
I would wait and see if you need more than 2TB’s of BW too. However I would also make sure your host can upgrade you affordably to 5TB, 10TB and beyond in case your fears bear merit. How much are you paying for the current server? Does your proposed site have revenue generating model?
Thanks Nebula that really helped. It is hard to decide. I am checking NetDNA and MAXCDN (I believe same company owns both websites). Prices are very nice.
A few that I know about are Cloudfront, LimeLight, and Akamai. I don’t have any personal experience with them. I was following a thread over on WHT where someone was testing their performance. I’ve heard Amazon’s cloud service can be quite expensive if you’re doing a lot of GET requests, because they charge for each one.
Seems like a CDN service would be most practical for your needs, unless you have zero budget. You pay for what you use, and your content is mirrored (ideally) across the globe closest to where the visitor is requesting. It might seem a wee bit expensive on the front end, but you have to consider hidden savings like not having to manage hardware or monitor uptime. Your main server can handle web site traffic, have uploads sent to the CDN, and serve the content straight from the CDN.
Tom, there are plenty of cloud hosts out there but bandwidth is usually pretty expensive anyway (hence the cost), you might well consider looking towards a host that specialises in media streaming as they tend to have higher capacity infrastructure and less serious bandwidth costs (unfortunately hosting a multimedia site is going to be expensive no matter which way you swing it, bandwidth is a valuable commodity online).
You should check to see if your dedicated hosting provider offer any remote storage like a SAN. SANs can be directly connected to your server allow you to add on additional storage to the server.
You may want to consider moving into a new server with more storage. It probably would be best to talk to your provider directly to see what storage options are available to you.
As per your requirements, I think a load balancing solution would be the best choice for you. The traffic on your site will be distributed among multiple dedicated servers and you can get good amount of bandwidth with those dedicated servers
The best advice by far IMHO is to stick with what you’ve got right now, as long as you have a plan on how to scale your site out if you need to. It’s a sad fact that most people/companies (even multi-nationals) massively overestimate the success of sites and/or their server needs and waste money needlessly.
I’d start the site with what you have now, if it looks like it’s going to go skywards (unlikely IMHO unless you’ve got a really targeted niche, copycat sites rarely take off like the original big hitter, but good luck to you) then you can upgrade quite easily and quickly these days - far better than shelling out over the odds for months and months, the money you’d “waste” by doing that could be put to better use promoting the site etc.
Site is not in English so it is original in many ways. Amazon S3 offers OK solution for my needs. Did anyone had experience working with Amazon Storage Services?
There are CDN alternatives to S3 worth looking at that may provide a better price ratio e.g simplecdn/softlayer cdn. Bandwidth is always going to be cheaper from a non-cloud standard host however.
I think most people here have totally ignored what the OP is requesting, I can understand if the issue was you hosting your own material but when you’re allowing other people to host their stuff on your site it can quickly spiral out of control (in terms of bandwidth usage). There are places like libsyn and cachefly which can house rich media solutions and their prices are pretty competitive but I’m not sure whether they would meet your scalability needs.
