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Ask HN: Most affordable method to host a lot of files
I'm working on a file sharing site (more info here for those interested: http://blog.serve2.com)
I'm looking for an affordable, stable and scalable solution, where I can host a large amount of files with fast upload speeds for people downloading the files. What solution would you suggest?
- mthomas 15y agoWhy not use S3 with cloudfront.
- paulhauggis 15y agoIsn't S3 really expensive?
- 18pfsmt 15y agoI suppose it depends on one's definition of expensive, but it is simple enough to see their pricing: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
- vitovito 15y agoIf you're building a file sharing site, aren't the logistics of sharing files exactly what your core competency is supposed to be? Why would you outsource that?
- GoofyGewber 15y agoI like your idea, and the website! S3 is probably your best way to go.
- dangrossman 15y agoYour first blog post is an admission of copyright infringement... and it's a video of a guy that's probably going to be imprisoned for doing the same thing. Are you sure you want to get into this business?
- ammmir 15y agofor simplicity and reducing time to market, outsource it to S3 or an S3 API-compatible storage provider. you can always buy disk boxes down the road and slap an S3-like API in front of them. in addition, you could use WebRTC to build a BitTorrent-like P2P distribution system that's native to the web, where your servers act as "seeds." this is to reduce your bandwidth costs for >1 clients downloading/streaming the same file.
- gspyrou 15y agoYou may aslo take a look at Windows Azure Storage https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/ https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/
- ayers 15y agoOut of interest you mentioned in that blog post that you received a DMCA notice for the video. Who was that notice from?
- dutchbrit 15y agoTVWorks Limited
- sheraz 15y agoPeople are touting S3, but you pay twice -- storage and transfer. Using the most inexpensive options with S3, a 1 gigabyte file (with reduced redundancy) with 1 download per month would run you $0.21. Even without the one download this would still cost you $0.093 just to keep the file! Let's ramp up and assume you have 1TB of storage and 250GB / month of transfer. How much is that? STORAGE: 1000 GB x $0.093 = $93.00 TRANSFER: 1000 GB x $0.120 = $120.00 TOTAL: $213.00 I should note the above does not include any servers which will actually run the websites. Lets compare this to hosting your own (ie - dedicated): I have a 1.5 TB RAID-I server with 1.8 TB transfer per month on a 100MB port on a month-to-month contract. STORAGE: 1.5TB RAID-I TRANSFER: 1.8TB Total : $123.00 / month It is a 8-core xeon with 4GB RAM -- I run a LAPP stack with 6 Cores dedicated to ffmpeg and image conversions. Waayyyy faster than cloud. This is more of a hosting and infrastructure question. I recommend bringing this question to the community at webhostingtalk.com. Yes, you will have to grow into these numbers, but that can happen pretty quickly.