tain.totalcodex.net

Yeah, I liked them for allowing the script I had in place to do this d/l trick, but now that that is no longer an issue I'm not as enamored.

I have a sneaky feeling most hosting companies have similar policies: things like "unlimited space" but then you can't use your hosting for storing a bunch of files, which is the only reason you'd need all the space, etc., etc.

Basically just a bunch of hidden asterisks.

And I agree: shifting is a pain. I started looking into other hosting companies but that started to become "work" so I gave it up for now. Will look into it again sometime.

Shifting is annoying, but if you want a bit more flexibility, I'd recommend just going for a VPS solution instead of "shared hosting". You can get really cheap VPSes now (see DigitalOcean, linode and others) and do whatever you want with the resources you're given. I eventually got fed up with stuff like what you are describing and realized that VPSes aren't even that much more expensive - if at all - these days. Been very happy since I switched.

Agreed that most hosting companies don't really want you just running a big file download server and will tend to start picking on users who have similar patterns despite their "unlimited" policies.

Interesting! I was starting to look into this recently for something else and was also wondering if the prices were now becoming competitive.

I'd like to have something flexible and ideally would like to have the ability to do some Linux and some Windows hosting so will check these out.

Appreciate the info!

punkUser wrote:... You can get really cheap VPSes now (see DigitalOcean, linode and others) and do whatever you want with the resources you're given. I eventually got fed up with stuff like what you are describing and realized that VPSes aren't even that much more expensive - if at all - these days....

Two problems:

1. Cost: I pay < $10 a month to host a number of sites that in theory are unlimited storage
2. I am lazy: I like just having things running and not having to deal with installing CPanel and MySQL and Apache and PHP and whatever else I would need to get a site up and running. My issue I know but I know me. I debug stuff and configure apps/tools/systems/devices work with each for a living I don't want to do it in my spare time.

punkUser wrote:Agreed that most hosting companies don't really want you just running a big file download server and will tend to start picking on users who have similar patterns despite their "unlimited" policies.

The thing that annoyed me was that the ever expanding storage was a large part of why I stayed with them - and yes I uploaded a Queen Mary sized collection of Zip files, but that was over a slow DSL connection seriously my upload rate is so slow I doubt it even blipped on their network monitoring software - and I hadn't even gotten around to linking the files to webpages/db so there was NO download traffic at all - the files were just sitting there using up a few GBs of ever cheaper HD space.

vinylrake wrote:The thing that annoyed me was that the ever expanding storage was a large part of why I stayed with them - and yes I uploaded a Queen Mary sized collection of Zip files, but that was over a slow DSL connection seriously my upload rate is so slow I doubt it even blipped on their network monitoring software - and I hadn't even gotten around to linking the files to webpages/db so there was NO download traffic at all - the files were just sitting there using up a few GBs of ever cheaper HD space.

Exactly. Was thinking: "I'll mail you a thumb drive we can use for the files, ok?"

vinylrake wrote: 1. Cost: I pay < $10 a month to host a number of sites that in theory are unlimited storage

Sure, although VPSes are fairly cheap for the resources that you get. I pay $10/month for a 1GB VPS that easily handles everything on GoS... metaserver, database server, web server (two actually), and all dedicated to just my site. I could easily get away with the $5 one, I just like to have the headroom. As people might recall, the speed of everything improved drastically when moving to the VPS from the shared hosting before. In particular, shared database servers tend to be really overloaded and slow :S

vinylrake wrote: 2. I am lazy: I like just having things running and not having to deal with installing CPanel and MySQL and Apache and PHP and whatever else I would need to get a site up and running. My issue I know but I know me. I debug stuff and configure apps/tools/systems/devices work with each for a living I don't want to do it in my spare time.

Fair enough, although I will note that getting a basic LAMP stack up and running is *really* easy these days. It's a half dozen commands that you can copy from FAQs really. (See for instance https://www.digitalocean.com/community/ ... -on-ubuntu.) While I'm a pretty technical guy, I'm no Linux expert and didn't find it very tough.

Space can be an issue, but there are solutions for that now as well. DigitalOcean's space tends to be expensive because it's mostly fast SSDs, but linode is a bit more reasonable.

Anyways I'm really not advocating people switch if you're happy with shared hosting. Just mentioning the option and how happy I've been with it.

Punk,

thanks for the info - space might still be an issue - i think the graveyard takes up a lot more space than GoS (understandably so with 4000+ db text pages, and hundreds of text/pdf files and dozens(100's?) of archived web pages, and an image gallery of maybe thousands of images). BUT I hadn't looked into VPs's in a couple of years so didn't realize the price had come down that much.

Yeah for storage depending on how much you need you probably want to look at something like network-attached storage rather than the local VPS's hard drive. It's slower, but of course better for infrequently-accessed archives. I haven't researched the options there since even storing all of the Myth films and even if activity picked up I think it'll take 10-20 years to exhaust my current storage, but it's not an uncommon problem so I'm sure there are practical solutions. I know there's Amazon S3 at least but haven't looked at prices.

But yeah, if you're happy with what you have, stick with it I mainly switched since I wasn't happy with shared hosting for what I was doing.

I am actually currently storing a backup copy of *most* of my map/plugin archive in an S3 storage bucket. Storage is really cheap so since there's no download bandwidth I pay - I forget - maybe a buck a month - plus I have the option of linking to files from webpages if I want to.