I run a music blog that gets a relatively decent amount of traffic (6-9k visitors a day). We offer free music download (Please no lectures on Copyrighted Materials, I am very familiar with the DMCA and am within its guidelines) and that causes us problems becasue we use a lot of bandwidth apparently. We use a file hosting site, hulkshare, which provides us with embed players to preview and download the songs posted. The site currently has close to 3,000 songs posted on it and we recently have been experiencing major downtime in our site. We use Bluehost currently and apparently the downtime is a result of the site “choking” all of our available space on their servers during our peak hours.
I understand that what I’m looking for is not going to be provided for free and I’m looking for a web host that can provide me with reliable service to ensure that I dont face downtime in my most important hours (it is literally money out of my pocket when the site is down).
Also if I am incorrect in my diagnosis/understanding of the problem, please feel free to correct/educate me, I’m relatively new at this and am going off what I have been told. I apologize for this thread, but figured that this would be helpful to supplement the side research I will be doing.
Have you heard of “cloud hosting”? It’s the new thing in web hosting, and suits large sites that have high and low traffic depending on time of day etc. Basically it means that, rather than your site sitting on a server with a fixed amount of storage and bandwidth, the server space can grow and contract as the demand varies, and you only pay for what you use. It’s much more cost-effective that buying a huge amount of server power just to cover times when there is a surge in demand.
There are lots of reputable companies in the cloud now, so perhaps you coud also Goggle “cloud hosting” and then get feedback here on the companies that look good to you (or just Goggle “[insert webhost] sucks” to see if it’s had any bad reviews).
Since the priority is for the bandwidth look for the hosting packages with unlimited bandwidth support which may solve the problem of downtime. However, the reliability of any hosting providers may come with the existence of them in the industry. Because of the competition in the industry you can get unlimited features set at relatively lesser cost.
Do not send them to the Cloud. It will cost more than $100 per month! Especially on EC2 where there are no backups copies as a part of the standard service. It is much more affordable to get a low cost Virtual Private Server. However moving to a VPS requires a budget between $20 and $40 per month.
