Web Hosting Unlimited Bandwidth – The Truth
Searching for web hosting with unlimited bandwidth? Then beware of the pitfalls.
In almost all cases, “unlimited bandwidth” is actually limited – it’s just the hosting company hasn’t set any hard and fast rules about what’s fair usage or not.
Make sure you read the fine print of your hosting contract. All reputable server hosting companies will tell you what the limits are likely to be. Even if they’re using a soft limit approach there should be a guide to acceptable bandwidth and for things like streaming media serving and image hosting. Then penalties could be temporary suspension of your site or complete disconnection (though that’s rare).
You can help avoid this by reading the Terms of Service and upgrading your hosting account when your site starts to get popular. The biggest bandwidth hogs tend to be media files, so if you’re serving up large numbers of image or media files consider using sites that specialize in media server hosting like YouTube, Amazon S3 or other content distribution networks.
Using Shoutcast as a Media Server Hosting Solution
Shoutcast is a media server streaming solution that allows anyone to stream audio on the internet. Think of it like an internet radio station – it works like a traditional radio station except that listeners “tune in” via the web instead of broadcast media.
You use Shoutcast to broadcast your audio stream, listeners use MP3 software to receive the streams such as iTunes, RealPlayer, Winamp, Windows Media Player or any other audio software capable of handling live MP3 streaming.
Powered by MP3 technology, Shoutcast is probably the easiest way to setup media server hosting so that you can broadcast and run your own radio station, whether you decide to use your own server hosting or use a third party as a media streaming host. Both options are supported by Shoutcast.
Media Temple Offers Virtual Environment For Media Server Hosting
One of the best known hosting providers, Media Temple, is now offering a new on-demand Virtual Private Server System (otherwise know as VPS hosting).
Media Temple says the new Virtual Environment server hosting is intended for advanced users who “rely on the more technical aspects of Linux and Open Source technology”.
Media Temple’s new VE Server uses Parallels Virtuozzo 4 OS virtualization, high-end HP server hardware, RAID-10 storage on SAS disks and premium network providers and is priced at $1 a day.
Virtual Private Server Hosting
At one time, virtual private server hosting was viewed with suspicion but in recent years it’s proved its worth and is now an accepted choice when choosing media server hosting.
Before the advent of virtual private server hosting, there was a large gap – both in terms of features and reliability as well as hosting costs – between the shared hosting and dedicated hosting solutions offers from web hosting companies.
With shared hosting you’re at the mercy of other websites running on the same server. If there is a problem with one of the (often) thousands of other sites on the same serve your website could also be affected, since the “shared” part of shared hosting means you’re sharing system resources with many others. One bandwidth hog can cause problems for many sites.
Dedicated server hosting solves that problem as you have web server all to yourself. But the catch is in the price – usually many, many times that of shared hosting.
Virtual private server hosting is a cross between the two. VPS hosting takes places on a single dedicated server that’s efficiently divided into a number of smaller servers. Each site has its own operating system meaning each hosted site operates independently of other sites on the server. The result is media server hosting where the reliability and uptime is comparable to dedicated hosting but at a price that’s not so different from shared hosting costs.
Comparing Windows to Linux for Media Server Hosting
When choosing an operating system for your media server hosting solution it usually comes down to two candidates: Windows or Linux.
Both are very common as hosting servers and both are well supported and mature products. So how can you compare Windows to Linux and make an informed decision?
Price could be one factor. Although for dedicated media server hosting you’ll normally find the cost of Windows and Linux to be about the same, in shared hosting scenarios Windows tends to cost more. That’s partly because it uses more shared hosting resources and partly because Microsoft charges for its operating system while Linux is free.
Another point in favor of Linux is server uptime. It’s not at all uncommon for Linux server uptime to be 100% over three months. A Windows server would rarely have such a good record.
The primary reason why you should choose Windows for media server hosting is if you need to run Windows-only applications like ASP.NET, MSSQL, MS Access, Expression Web, FrontPage, Windows Streaming Media or other Microsoft applications.
If you’ve never heard or those or don’t need them for your web hosting, you’ll almost certainly be better off with Linux for your media server hosting.
Media Server Hosting with Amazon Cloudfront
If you think that Amazon Cloudfront hosting is just for the big boys & girls, think again. Amazon now have a low cost cloud distribution network (CDN) which is great for sites with relatively modest media streaming needs.
In a nutshell, Amazon Web Services Cloudfront is a hosting service that allows you to pay only for the data transferred to users. There’s no minimum monthly payment and no sign up or setup fees. The only cost is what you actually transfer with the service.
How to setup Amazon Cloudfront Streaming
1 – Create an AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) if you don’t already have one. This is where your media content will be stored.
2 – Create a new bucket in S3 for media storage.
3 – Now move your content to your S3 bucket. Don’t forget to allow public access.
4 – Create a Cloudfront streaming distribution that points to the S3 media storage bucket you just setup.
5 – You’ll be glad to know there is no step 5. You’re ready to use Cloudfront as your media server hosting service.
Go Daddy Cloud Server for Mac OS X
Web host and domain name specialists Go Daddy have begun offering a Virtual Private Server (VPS) package powered by Mac OS X.
Go Daddy call it, “a complete IT solution for small to medium businesses”.
Each server comes with email, address book, iCal server, iPhone integration, WiKi, blog and podcasting options. The virtual server runs on a combination of Parallels, Xserver and Apple 1U server.
Plans start from $99.99 a month for up to 10 users.
Cloud Media Server Hosting Free for 30 Days
Leading hosting and web application provider Hostway is currently offering the first thirty days of Smart Cloud Storage for free.
Hostway’s Smart Cloud Storage is a simple storage service allowing unlimited and scalable data storage coupled with a web based control panel and API. Cloud hosting has taken off in the last year or so as an inexpensive way of hosting and streaming media files to end users. Companies using cloud services pay only for what they use.
In the case of Hostway, there’s a monitoring system that allows users to predict monthly storage and hosting costs. Hostway is also offering 10GB of Smart Cloud Storage for free with all of its cloud servers.