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Alternate to Amazon S3, any other suggestions?

by Kalidasa
19 replies
I'm looking for video hosting at a reasonable price. Amazon S3 video hosting can get pretty expensive if you get a lot of traffic. Mediatemple.net is cheaper if you get the traffic. Their packages start at $20 per month for 100 GB storage and 1 TB transfer. Any other recommendations? I saw one thread with a good non-cloud hosting site for $10 per month, but can't find the tread now.
#alternate #amazon #suggestions
  • Profile picture of the author Marty S
    What is expensive to you? I am paying about $100 per month at webvideozone. I dont think Amazon is more than that. I actually heard AS3 is rather a bargain, but haven't tried myself.
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    • Profile picture of the author Brandon Tanner
      SimpleCDN is awesome. Been using them for several months now off an on, and their service has been great. Far cheaper than S3 too...

      SimpleCDN - Pure Delivery
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      • Profile picture of the author Mike Hill
        Originally Posted by Brandon Tanner View Post

        SimpleCDN is awesome. Been using them for several months now off an on, and their service has been great. Far cheaper than S3 too...

        SimpleCDN - Pure Delivery
        I just had a look at the prices and unless I'm missing something they are both around the same price at 3.9 cents per GB.

        Mike Hill
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        • Profile picture of the author Brandon Tanner
          Originally Posted by Mike Hill View Post

          I just had a look at the prices and unless I'm missing something they are both around the same price at 3.9 cents per GB.

          Mike Hill
          According to their pricing page, S3 is 17 cents per GB for data transfer out (not including the 'requests' charge)...

          Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

          Where do you see 3.9 cents per GB?
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          • Profile picture of the author Mike Hill
            Originally Posted by Brandon Tanner View Post

            According to their pricing page, S3 is 17 cents per GB for data transfer out (not including the 'requests' charge)...

            Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

            Where do you see 3.9 cents per GB?
            Good Lord, looking back on it now I completely read it wrong... I don't know how I missed that, thanks for pointing that out.

            I guess I have some work to do this weekend shifting all my content...

            Good work!

            Mike Hill
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      • Profile picture of the author magentawave
        Originally Posted by Brandon Tanner View Post

        SimpleCDN is awesome. Been using them for several months now off an on, and their service has been great. Far cheaper than S3 too...

        SimpleCDN - Pure Delivery
        How about speed? I've read S3 can be slow loading. Is SimpleCDN fast when loading videos? Which setup are you using? Stormfront, Hurricane, or Lightning?

        Thanks
        Steve
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  • Profile picture of the author Kalidasa
    Thanks Brandon, that's a definite possibility.
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  • Profile picture of the author LonNaylor
    Mike,

    Josh Anderson recommends Web Hosting: Dedicated & Shared Website Hosting Solutions - Aplus.net

    Haven't tried them myself but if Josh likes 'em they would be worth a look...

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    • Profile picture of the author Trader54
      Originally Posted by LonNaylor View Post

      Mike,

      Josh Anderson recommends Web Hosting: Dedicated & Shared Website Hosting Solutions - Aplus.net

      Haven't tried them myself but if Josh likes 'em they would be worth a look...
      I use video but have to admit up front I'm not all up on the tech end of things.

      What is it about this hosting service that makes it good if you have video. Is there
      a special package they have that one should take if you are streaming video.
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  • Profile picture of the author Kalidasa
    These are some great suggestions! Thanks everyone for your suggestions.
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  • Profile picture of the author Josh Anderson
    I use video but have to admit up front I'm not all up on the tech end of things.

    What is it about this hosting service that makes it good if you have video. Is there
    a special package they have that one should take if you are streaming video.
    The biggest misunderstanding in media hosting today is what you just illustrated...

    You do not need "special hosting" for video.

    A file is a file.

    All you need is reliable hosting with a lot of bandwidth available. Scott and I have tested Aplus.net for two years now with fairly high volume consumption and it has always been reliable and dependable.

    Also when I asked them the hard questions before testing them they answered all my requirements very well for an economy shared solution.

    You also may want to consider:

    Web Hosting by PowWeb - One Plan, One Price

    They offer colocated load balanced file hosting. Also when you sign up for a year its under $4 a month. Plus when going through the signup process they offer you a $3 a month upgrade for an akamai distribution enhancement which I'd recommend as well.

    If you are doing volume under a terabyte a month you should be great with those solutions.
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    • Profile picture of the author Trader54
      Originally Posted by Josh Anderson View Post

      The biggest misunderstanding in media hosting today is what you just illustrated...

      You do not need "special hosting" for video.

      A file is a file.
      Thanks, that was certainly my misunderstanding thought a different delivery method for videos was what one needed.

      Thanks for clearing that up.
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    • Profile picture of the author magentawave
      Originally Posted by Josh Anderson View Post

      The biggest misunderstanding in media hosting today is what you just illustrated...

      You do not need "special hosting" for video.

      A file is a file.

      All you need is reliable hosting with a lot of bandwidth available. Scott and I have tested Aplus.net for two years now with fairly high volume consumption and it has always been reliable and dependable.

      Also when I asked them the hard questions before testing them they answered all my requirements very well for an economy shared solution.

      You also may want to consider:

      Web Hosting by PowWeb - One Plan, One Price

      They offer colocated load balanced file hosting. Also when you sign up for a year its under $4 a month. Plus when going through the signup process they offer you a $3 a month upgrade for an akamai distribution enhancement which I'd recommend as well.

      If you are doing volume under a terabyte a month you should be great with those solutions.
      Thanks for clearing that up for me too Josh! If I'm totally satisfied with my host (Hostgator / SEOHosting.com), because they have awesome toll free 24/7 customer and tech support, and they offer unlimited disk space and bandwidth for only $4.95 per month, are there any reasons I should be aware of that would make me NOT want to use them to host my streaming video?

      Thanks
      Steve
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      • Profile picture of the author Josh Anderson
        Originally Posted by magentawave View Post

        Thanks for clearing that up for me too Josh! If I'm totally satisfied with my host (Hostgator / SEOHosting.com), because they have awesome toll free 24/7 customer and tech support, and they offer unlimited disk space and bandwidth for only $4.95 per month, are there any reasons I should be aware of that would make me NOT want to use them to host my streaming video?

        Thanks
        Steve
        Yeah...

        There is no such thing as unlimited with solutions such as host gator because the resource is limited. The unlimited offers in hosting should all be taken with a grain of salt because they are never truly unlimited... many times hosting companies limit the number of concurrent connections, limit your overuse of the pipe, limit your overuse of the cpu, limit your mysql queries etc.

        There is always small print and you are limited by the size of the pipe as well which is generally between 10mbbp and 100mbps with shared hosting services.

        I recommend sticking with your economy hosting but making sure you have a backup where you can move your files should you hit any problems.

        99% of publishers using hostgator type unlimited solutions never get enough exposure to worry about such things which is why they offer unlimited. Most people just don't generate that much interest in their content.

        Get more than 10,000 hits to you video a day and I bet you will find that the unlimited was not so unlimited after all ;-)
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        • Profile picture of the author magentawave
          Originally Posted by Josh Anderson View Post

          Yeah...

          There is no such thing as unlimited with solutions such as host gator because the resource is limited. The unlimited offers in hosting should all be taken with a grain of salt because they are never truly unlimited... many times hosting companies limit the number of concurrent connections, limit your overuse of the pipe, limit your overuse of the cpu, limit your mysql queries etc.

          There is always small print and you are limited by the size of the pipe as well which is generally between 10mbbp and 100mbps with shared hosting services.

          I recommend sticking with your economy hosting but making sure you have a backup where you can move your files should you hit any problems.

          99% of publishers using hostgator type unlimited solutions never get enough exposure to worry about such things which is why they offer unlimited. Most people just don't generate that much interest in their content.

          Get more than 10,000 hits to you video a day and I bet you will find that the unlimited was not so unlimited after all ;-)
          Hi Josh,

          I use Hostgators other company (seohosting.com) to host my sites but they cost quite a bit more than the Hostgator side and they are far too expensive for video hosting. Even Hostgators dedicated servers start at $175 per month...soooo that is out of the question for me at this point. I called Hostgator after I posted my question to you and found out that their cheap $5.00 per month shared hosting doesn't offer something called ffmpeg which apparently serves your videos into whatever format the viewers computer can read.

          Looking at S3 and SimpleCDN, etc. is a little confusing because I really have no idea how much bandwidth I will need at this point since I have no frame of reference.

          The two sources you recommend (aplus.net and powweb.com) say they offer "unlimited" disk space and bandwidth for $5 per month, but their fine print clearly states that really isn't the case. Anyway, what is it about those two hosts that makes you recommend them for video hosting over any other shared hosting plan?

          Thanks
          Steve
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  • Profile picture of the author Kalidasa
    Thanks Josh. That is a big misunderstanding. I was looking into Aplus and figuring this out. I'm not really sure if my current hosting can answer the hard questions, so I'll look into Powweb too.
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