Need hosting with high diskspace to bandwidth ratio

CareImages · 11th April 2006

Hi

I'm looking to get a hosting packing for our new site, which is a photo library aimed at the care and voluntary sectors in the UK.

The way we've set the site up, visitors can browse thumbnails and screensized versions of the images in our library without restriction and get access to the fullsize camera original on payment of the licence fee (or use of a picture credit). This means that the fullsize images, at an average size of around 2Mb each, are also stored on the server, although accessed comparatively few times. Thus the need for a high amount of storage compared to bandwidth, especially while we are just getting the business off the ground. I am looking to start with at least 10Gb of storage (which WILL be used, don't oversell!) and bandwidth of maybe only 5Gb per month (very much a rough estimate at this stage and not including the initial ftp'ing of the picture files). Please include costs of additional storage and bandwidth.

You can see a development version of the site at http://careimages.com/ (this is currently running on one of the machines in our office via the ADSL link, so apologies for it being slow or even unavailable!

The site is built using MYSQL 4 /PHP 4 and uses the GD library to overlay the watermark on the fly on the screensized images when a visitor is not logged in. (Although this does not seem a resource heavy thing to do on our test machine, I will consider changing this if advised to do so). It has a fully working interface to Paypal for online payments including IPN handling.

I would very much prefer the server to be based in the UK as that is our initial market. If anyone offering packages can also provide a link to a PHP info page on one of their servers just so I can check for the libraries I'm using, so much the better.

One last thing, must be able to host multiple domains pointing to the same web space (we currently also have careimages.co.uk for instance and may acquire more domain variations in the future). My prefered method to do this is using an Apache rewrite rule so that whatever domain is used for initial access all requests are shown as being handled by careimages.com (our branding).

Regards,

Tim Brown
Technical Director
Care Images Limited

lgeib · 11th April 2006

10GB Disk space
100GB Transfer / Month
20 MySQL Databases
Unlimited email/domains/sub-domains
Direct admin control panel
SSH Access
Free Domain when paying yearly.
£19.99/Month or £199.99/Year

- All servers are on remote reboot ports
- All servers have kvm over ip access
- Our servers are located in the UK
- Our Transit suppliers offer us a 100% Uptime agreement
- We offer 24/7 Support
- We can provide details of existing (Nominated) Clients who would be quite happy to share their experience with us.
- We offer a 7 Day Money back Guarantee

www.ikcs.net/test.file - Test our speeds with this 50MB download.
194.150.120.40 - Test IP

Other packages are available upon request.

E-Mail lawrence@ikcs.net or call 0870 141 7273 with any questions you may have, for a custom quote or to place an order.

SynergyWorks · 11th April 2006

Hi Tim.

If you drop me an email to r.bentley [at] synergyworks.co.uk i'll put you together a formal hosting proposal, however provisioanlly we can provide:

20GB Disk Space
60GB Monthly Bandwidth
PHP4/MySQL & GD2 support

£30/month + FREE setup.

Add £7/month for 7 day rolling backup available via FTP. Allows you to access
the previous 7 days worth of copies of your wwwroot.

Speed Test: http://speedtest.synergyworks.co.uk/100mb.tst

Rob

Cranky · 11th April 2006

Hi Tim,

We can offer you one of our Virtual Private Server (VPS) solutions which should meet your storage/traffic requirements

VPS 10:
----------------------------
10GB Fault-Tolerant Diskspace
150GB Data Transfer (Monthly)
256MB Guaranteed Memory
1GB Burstable Memory
2000 CPU Weight
3 Unique IP Addresses
Plesk 7.5 Reloaded or 8 (30 domains)
Plesk Application Vault Add-on
Plesk SpamAssassin Add-on
-----------------------------
USA-Based:
$39.95/month (monthly)
$37.95/month (semi-annually)
$35.95/month (annually)
-----------------------------
UK-Based:
£39.95/month (monthly)
£37.95/month (semi-annually)
£35.95/month (annually)
-----------------------------

VPS 20:
-----------------------------
20GB Fault-Tolerant Diskspace
300GB Data Transfer (Monthly)
512MB Guaranteed Memory
2GB Burstable Memory
4000 CPU Weight
3 Unique IP Addresses
Plesk 7.5 Reloaded or 8 (30 domains)
Plesk Application Vault Add-on
Plesk SpamAssassin Add-on
-----------------------------
USA-Based:
$69.95/month (monthly)
$67.95/month (semi-annually)
$65.95/month (annually)
-----------------------------
UK-Based:
£69.95/month (monthly)
£67.95/month (semi-annually)
£65.95/month (annually)
-----------------------------

VPS 30:
-----------------------------
30GB Fault-Tolerant Diskspace
450GB Data Transfer (Monthly)
768MB Guaranteed Memory
3GB Burstable Memory
6000 CPU Weight
3 Unique IP Addresses
Plesk 7.5 Reloaded or 8 (30 domains)
Plesk Application Vault Add-on
Plesk SpamAssassin Add-on
-----------------------------
USA-Based:
$99.95/month (monthly)
$97.95/month (semi-annually)
$95.95/month (annually)
-----------------------------
UK-Based:
£99.95/month (monthly)
£97.95/month (semi-annually)
£95.95/month (annually)
-----------------------------

Upgrades (USA-Based):
-----------------------------
Plesk 100 Domains: $5/month
Plesk Unlimited Domains: $10/month
Plesk PowerPack: $5/month
Dr. Web Antivirus: $10/month
Additional IP Address: $1/month

Upgrades (UK-Based):
-----------------------------
Plesk 100 Domains: £5/month
Plesk Unlimited Domains: £10/month
Plesk PowerPack: £5/month
Dr. Web Antivirus: £10/month
Additional IP Address: £1/month

All our VPS solutions are managed which means we can look after the server security, upgrades, configuration and customisation for you. For example, if you require RedHat or MySQL upgrades you can open a support ticket and we will upgrade you, same if you require changes to PHP config.

VPS solutions mean you are 100% isolated from other clients ensuring you are not adversely affected by resource usage external to your VPS.

We have been using the Plesk platform for 5 years and Virtuozzo (VPS platform) for approximately 2 years) and actively participate in the ongoing development of these products, so our 24/7 support team know the platforms very well.

If you have any questions or would like a demonstration please email us via sales[at]transnexis.com and we can assist.

wise · 11th April 2006

Hi

We can offer 20GB / 100GB for £35 month (inc). Server is UK based and a php file can be accessed - please email brian@wisehosting.co.uk for this url though.

Extra space and bandwidth can be bought in chunks of whatever you need.

Server would have cpanel and the account would be a reseller allowing multi domain hosting.

please email sales@wiseclients.com for more info or to order.

thanks
brian

ChipMonk · 12th April 2006

pm sent to you.

markcastle · 12th April 2006

We host a few (rather large) image libraries (such as http://www.rspb-images.com for example) although we don't do Linux hosting which is what i assume you are after?

However i'd just like to say... many here will likely consider it overkill (but your business looks to be serious especially considering the fees you are looking to charge), have you considered going the dedicated/managed server route? If i had a business with annual subscriptions of £500 and image downloads worth £120 a time i wouldn't want to be sharing a server with thousands of websites where each and every one can potentially have an impact on the business and make or break it. There are plenty of providers on these forums that can do dedicated and managed servers at very good rates - you'd probably be quite surprised at the affordability.

If however you really don't have the budget for a dedicated then VPS from someone like transnexis would be the next best thing.

TITAN · 12th April 2006

We host some massive image libraries (ministry of defence being one) and the one aspect I can't see mentioned, let alone covered below is backups.

On our normal shared servers we do daily backups and keep a 7 day rotation. If hosts are running a reasonable number of sites with large diskspace allocations check out the backup policies.

For image libraries differential backups, or even 1 a month backups (of the image data) are possibly the way to go because there is little change.

We also avoid hosting sites with a large number of files on shared servers because the filesystems get unmanageable - filesystem checks can run into hours...

In our experience image libraries require a very different approach to normal shared hosting and this is why a dedicated server is the way to go.

as always, horses for courses.

fusion · 12th April 2006

Hi Tim,

Please drop me an email to pierce.lynch[at]netsolutionsuk.net and I will get a formal proposal to you for your above mentioned requirements.

Thanks!

CareImages · 12th April 2006

Thanks for the replies everybody, especially the more considered ones.

I have seriously been thinking about a dedicated machine although for the time being I have difficulty justifying the cost and I think it would be greatly underutilised. We are still working from our seed capital. But I do see shared hosting as very much an interim measure until we have established a customer base. We don't have the capital for a major marketing campaign at this time so I only predict traffic levels growing at a slow pace. (and by the way, our prices haven't been finalised yet so any projected income level right now might be just wishful thinking!). So really, I see shared hosting as just a way to get the site out there being served at a decent speed while we fine tune the idea and make sure that we have pitched it right.

As regards backups, these are not a major issue for me as, with the exception of the transactional database data (which I will take a copy of daily), we will always have a full backup of the site on one of our office machines.

Anyway for the next few days,I will now review the proposals people have put forward.

thermaldegree · 12th April 2006

Hi Tim,

If you could drop an e-mail to taylor@vidahost.com then I have an exciting proposal which I'd like you to consider

Also re your point about dynamically processing images, I'd say that watermarking them and storing them would be better than doing 10+ GD operations per non-logged-in-user pageload, as the vast majority of users will be casual browsers and, of course, search engines - which translates into a fair amount of CPU time.

gbackup · 13th April 2006

i need to read the rules, fish can read better you know.

ksb · 14th April 2006

PM sent

gnethosting · 18th April 2006

Read the rules!