I have one customer (a church) that will need to have a number of AVI’s and MP3’s made available to their members and to non-members.
One of the issues I always run into when I have a reseller account is disk space for customers like this. For example they could go to one of the larger hosts that sell a shared account for $9 a month and give them 10GB of space. I can’t do this because I would have to jump to the Gold Host and then I wouldn’t be making enough money to justify it. The bandwidth usage would be low as this is not a high usage site, but there definitely could be a number of AVI’s(DIVX) or (MPG’s) and MP3’s. We were wanting to provide 3 levels of quality like some of the other sites do. High Quality, Medium, and low, but by having 3 of the same video requires even more space and then if I give 3 of the same video under one format and 3 under another format then you are not up to 6 videos.
Anyway, what are some alternatives out there that I could possible use for the storage of the files that the main site could link off to that will not break my bank or the customers?
[QUOTE=gsaunders]
For example they could go to one of the larger hosts that sell a shared account for $9 a month and give them 10GB of space.
[/QUOTE]
That is overselling.
If a host really sold 10GB of space for $9/mo, then he’d only be able to host say 10 accounts (100GB). He’d make only $90/mo per server, and would go into a loss.
There is alot of overselling in the industry. Many hosts that provide crazy deals like this will kick you off if you approach anywhere near their disk space limit
[QUOTE=Yash]
That is overselling.
If a host really sold 10GB of space for $9/mo, then he’d only be able to host say 10 accounts (100GB). He’d make only $90/mo per server, and would go into a loss.
There is alot of overselling in the industry. Many hosts that provide crazy deals like this will kick you off if you approach anywhere near their disk space limit
[/QUOTE]
I figured many are doing overselling however I have several friends that have successfully used those big companies and a lot of the disk space that the company claims is available to them.
I am hoping to find an alternative just for storage that I can used to help alleviate the disk space needs so I am hoping someone here may have an alternative that may be cost effective. I know if I simply increase my plan size it would be cost prohibitive at the moment.
How about you just get one of those account as maybe a subdomain for the account (download.domain.com) and store the files there for download. Can’t fight them, then use them is what I say.
If this church was large enough I would use someone like limelight, but they are not that large… getting there, but it will be 2 to 4 years before they get to that size.
I’ll just have to see what I can work out. I would be nervous about the large web space sites as a storage location as well… I may have to check into some places that server just that purpose and specialize in it… and compare that to just upgrading my plans or getting a customized plan with more disk space.
[QUOTE=Dave96]
How much storage are you looking at?
[/QUOTE]
If we provided 2 codec types (DIVX and Quicktime) and three quality sizes (low, medium, and high) then I can expect to use about 140MB per 5 minute clip. I may rethink the whole quality thing and maybe force using one codec and bring the size requirements down to about 35MB per 5 minute clip.
I certainly don’t want to use any default codecs already on windows as they don’t do a very good job at compression/quality in comparison to the DIVX and Qucktime. I guess I figured starting out with 10GB which will allow a year of growth. I don’t think the bandwidth would need to change much as they are currently low usage.
