Suggestions For Music Hosting?

First time accepted submitter achbed writes "In conjunction with a friend of mine, I'm operating a small(ish) site that contains a large quantity of music (mp3/ogg) that we pay streaming licenses for. The site currently has about 35GB of files, and pulls down an average of about 3TB a month of bandwidth — and we're just getting started. We've been unable to find any hosting packages out there that are not of the 'unlimited' variety (meaning they can kick us at any time because we're using too much) that are not costing an insane amount of money. Our current 'main page' host charges about $0.50/GB/mo, which for this much data equates to $500 a month per TB. As we are expecting growth, this is quickly going to become a major problem, as were doing this out of our own pockets (that are not that deep). Does anyone have good leads on businesses that provide significant bandwidth (5-10TB/month) for inexpensive money? Or are we going to have to accept a price in the thousands per month to run this kind of site, with 'going viral' providing a significant risk to our pockets?" $500 for what works out to under 5Mbps (95th pecentile mojo) seems a bit steep. These guys want to enter the 20+Mbps realm; I've done some high bandwidth hosting before, but it seems like you enter a different world when you need more than 10Mbps.

achbed continues: "We've looked into some of the major CDNs as well. Either they do not 'support streaming' (CloudFlare), or cost thousands for what we're needing."

Co-Locate

[Anonymous Coward]

Invest in your own servers (about US$ 5-8K) and then you'll find a world of options opening up to you as you look for colocation companies. We're on EGI Hosting which costs around $700 a month for an 95%tile 100Mbps ( on a 1Gbps connect ) pipe.

Re:EC2?

[revcompgeek]

So $10,000 for 10 TB? That's not exactly what they're looking for.

Is this a business or an expensive hobby?

[enjar]

Expenses:
- Streaming music license fees
- Bandwidth
- Server
- Time

Income:
- Nada

Plan:
- Buy more bandwidth to serve more music.

Right now it looks like "expensive hobby". Which can be cool. But if you are expecting this to put dinner on the table, figure it out now.

You don't want "hosting"

[Glendale2x]

It doesn't sound like you're looking for the right thing. You probably don't want "hosting", but rather a VPS, dedicated server, or a colocation.

Or are we going to have to accept a price in the thousands per month to run this kind of site, with 'going viral' providing a significant risk to our pockets?"

Then get out of the mindset of paying per GB and get a 100 meg commit instead. Maybe even a 50 meg commit will serve you well depending on your needs, but either way it's a fixed pipe with a fixed bill that you don't ever have to worry about additional bandwidth charges on.

Re:Co-Locate - hurricane electric

[Anonymous Coward]

Please consider hurricane electric (he.net) - they have been a great contributor to the community (with their irc.lightning.net servers and their free ipv6 tunnels, etc.) and their bandwidth is $1/megabit.

$600/mo for a full cabinet and 100 megabits/s of bandwidth. And it's not some lame fly by night ... I highly recommend them.

Wrong on so many levels. Hurricane Electric is absolutely fly-by-night. You can read about my experiences as a co-location customer [nether.net] if you wish. And don't try to tell me FMT2 is any better [nether.net]. You can review the outages.org and NANOG mailing lists for recurring problems with HE, but my first link outlines the majority of recurring items that they simply never cared to deal with. Dumping HE and going with a different co-lo provider was the best choice I ever made.

If folks considering co-location in the SF Bay Area want reliability, actual SLAs, and for less money, consider alternatives. If all you want is a 1U box in some random rack and trust other co-lo customers to never steal or fuck with your equipment, go right ahead, choose Hurricane Electric, choose Layer42, choose whoever you wish -- don't blame me when someone unplugs your Ethernet cable, steals a disk from your box, or other nonsense. If there's anything I learned from working in the co-location business over the past 20 years, it's never to trust co-lo users.

Careful here...

[Max Night]

Lots of folks are recommending that you go with your own server. As someone who has gone that route before, I can tell you that unless you want to become a server admin, and deal with all security and updates, intrusion and hacking attempts, etc, you're way better off finding a place where you can get a dedicated server - and they'll do the maintenance, security and upgrades. Had my own server - and when it got hacked, it got hacked badly. My fault, because though I'm web savvy, server maintenance & security is it's own art, which I never should have attempted. (FWIW, and I do NOT work for them, I'm doing this now with Host Duplex. http://hostduplex.com/ [hostduplex.com] They have been extraordinarily helpful, communicative and stable.) Hope this helps. M.