Hosting Question -- Need 20 TB of monthly data transfer

Hi there

I'm attempting to start a company and plan to feature several 1-hour animations on my website and expect (hopefully) to have 80k users downloading 2 animations per year. If I do the math, that means:

(700 GB animation x 80k users x 2 downloads) / 12 months = 18.7 TB monthly transfer

I have a few questions (if you don't mind):

1. What kind of web hosting service would actually be able to fulfill such bandwidth usage (at very reasonable rates -- I've only budgeted $1,500 per year for hosting)?
   
2. Can you provide services you would recommend?
   
3. I was assuming that streaming these animations would not be an option and that downloadable content is best -- would you agree?

So far, I've only been able to find hosts like DreamHost and ValueWeb that seem reliable and customer-friendly -- plus only charge about $0.02 / GB transfer. However, they only seem to provide up to 3.5 TB of monthly data transfer.

Any help/insight would be much much appreciated! Thank you.

I don't think you should be talking to hosts, as much as you should be talking to the people hosts talk to.

hey dude
go to http://www.hostdepartment.com/
they say they have UNLIMITED BANDWITH AND UNLIMITED DISK SPACE
check out and if it is true please pm me

unlimited plans just are never gonna cut it

you need a dedicated server and a good managed host i would imagine

are you making a decent income from the site?

you need to build your own mega uber awesome server with huge hard drives and probably a main board with several processors and so much awesome parts. Or seek a real expert.

Hardware is not really an issue; drives are cheap and disk arrays make formulation of data simplistic and recoverable.

The problem is bandwidth utilization, and how much your host will charge for said bandwidth.

Hardware is not really an issue; drives are cheap and disk arrays make formulation of data simplistic and recoverable.

The problem is bandwidth utilization, and how much your host will charge for said bandwidth.

Please don't jump on "unlimited bandwidth" options, it's never true and you'll realize that shortly. 20TB is going to cost thousands a month guaranteed. Yes, you should be talking with line/backbone providers vs. a host. Do you require hosting or can you host your own material with your own servers?

Either way, its a huge expense, i will guarantee you that.

How many users do you currently have? I'm guessing you don't have 80k just yet. It may be worthwhile to start off at somewhere like serverbeach.com. They offer 2TB of transfer, which should be enough to keep you alive for awhile.

If you outgrow that, you should probably start looking at cheap bandwidth providers, such as cogent. The quality of the bandwidth isn't ideal, but they'd be able to offer you solutions that could cope with 20TB/month.

Another thought is to compress the animations, similar to YouTube. Cutting down the quality a bit could save you a bundle in bandwidth costs.

your going to need a dedicated server for this type of site, unlimited shared plans just wont be enough since most shared plans have a limit on the amount of cpu cycles you can use (usually 10% or less) and by the sounds of it your site will use far more than that.


Hope this helps a little

try Dreamhost.com

145.5GB storage at signup (increases by 1GB pw)

that for only $9.95 a month

i use them very good.
PM me and i can provide you with a code to get either a extra free domain or the $50 setup fee waived on any pay monthly plan

I have not used Dream Host but I have been told that they heavily restrict the number of CPU cycles that you can use.

Hope this helps,

to be honest ive never had a problem with them their support is first class never wait more than 10 minutes for a reply, only had about 2-3 hours of downtime due to a disk crash, but they were onto it like a bullet. much better than my previous host: webkoreserver!

Totally true. They might offer you "unlimited bandwidth" but they are limited to whatever their ISP gives them and whatever their network hardware can do. Maybe the solution is to divide and conquer. Instead of having just the one hosting service that does all the work for you, why not use something like Akamai (I think that is what it is called) to hold your animations and the rest of the website is at the web host of your choice. This is what a lot of the big guns like google and yahoo and countless other humungous websites do for images and stuff. They keep the bare content of the website on one server, then stuff like images and what not are retrieved from another server over the internet.

I guess I just figure why use one server and one host when two servers and two hosts will work better?