Comments on: S3 makes website hosting reasonable again

By: Tahir Akhtar

Tahir Akhtar — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 21:05:05 +0000

For DNS try zoneedit.com. It hosts upto five domains for free. Lets you create A, CNAME, MX etc records.
Easy to use web interface.
But the mod-rewrite approach looks more powerful to me.
I will be looking around for more info on that.

By: ladyada

ladyada — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 22:27:40 +0000

flexibility, and also i dont have DNS access at my hosting provider

By: Zach

Zach — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 08:29:13 +0000

Why not use a CNAME record and avoid the rewriting entirely?

By: Dingo

Dingo — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 05:13:34 +0000

I’m using NearlyfreeSpeech… http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net .

for a less than five bucks a month I host five sites, and get charged only for bandwith and storage used. 1 cent a month per MB storage, and $1 a month per GB. In comparison with S3, that might seem expensive, but… the speed at NFS is faster and you can set up as many sites as you want with PHP, SSH and MYSQL, and the support is lightning fast and amazing… They also sell bandwidth in advance in “buckets”… for when you get slashdotted: $40 buys 72GB for use in the coming week, or if you just need 20GB bandwidth for two days, that’ll be $10. The main aspect fo their business is that they are not out to gouge you like mosts hosts are, but rather to give you exactly what you need. this is reflected in little things like automated balance (i.e. traffic) warnings, free awstats, and pretty much total control over the innards of your hosting.

Probably not everyone’s cup of tea, but it is kind of addictive once you start using it. Definitely worth checking out.

By: xxdesmus

xxdesmus — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 19:53:42 +0000

@ladyada

I could not agree more with your dislike of Dreamhost. They are the definition of over selling, and as you mentioned they have a nice habit of jamming far too many virtual servers onto a single physical server. Neither of these traits are much to my liking when it comes to a webhost. I don’t exactly have a large blog, but back a few months ago I was pushing past my bandwidth every single month. Although I could have moved all of my images over to S3, I decided at the time to move them over to Flickr to reduce the bandwidth. My planned paid off, but I am still looking at possibly switching to S3 instead.

By: Turbinca

Turbinca — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 19:21:46 +0000

i am using http://www.pixilive.com.
Pixilive is a free image hosting service. Upload your pictures, images or videos and share them easily with your friends, family, or on Forums, messenger mail, Blogs, Avatars, etc.. This service is completely FREE!!

By: b0j3

b0j3 — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 06:56:06 +0000

I’m using ADSL with 4Mb output (i think 512k input) with static IP with my own “in the house” server.
The cheapest solution (at least for now) regarding the cost.

By: ladyada

ladyada — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 06:26:04 +0000

Well the PDF was generated by InDesign, could probably be compressed some. But even if I fixed that, there’s hundreds of images (and multiply that by getting linked from a ‘popular’ blog) Its more a question of scale: for every new project I churn out theres a bunch of documentation added to an existing pool of content. And nobody would like it if i skimped on my documentation or took down older stuff!

As for dreamhost…well, they dont get such great reviews: http://www.webhostingjury.com/reviews/DreamHost . Sounds like they jam a lot of servers onto one machine: great for everyday users, but not great for people trying to keep the website up and running with so much stuff (One of the nice things about LS is that they co-lo at Rackspace which is ridiculously reliable.)

Anyways with S3 you dont have to worry about how fast DH can push out data or whether its stored concurrently - its ultrafast already and spread all over Amazon’s huge network!

Thanks for the comment - Im really interested in this ‘problem’, perhaps enough to think about how something like ’sourceforge’ for projects could be super useful (instructables.com approaches this right now)

By: SuperJdynamite

SuperJdynamite — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 04:23:59 +0000

I would also recommend Dreamhost for hosting. Their basic package ($9.95/mo) gives you 1.654 TB (yes, Terabytes) of bandwidth a month which increases by 16GB every week. Disk storage is 165.4 GB and increases by 1GB/week.

Also, why would you not zip up that PDF? Unless it’s just images jammed into PDF it will probably compress down to a minuscule shadow of it’s former self. Sure it won’t open in a browser if it’s zipped, but whatever.

Finally, I think you’re a victim of your own success. Have you considered simply being less popular?