This is my first post, after reading through many threads on this forum it seems like a solid place to get some info on web hosting from real people. Seems like Google searches just turn up hundreds of sites like “www [dot] bestwebhostingreviews [dot] com” and “www [dot] 10bestwebhostingcompanies [dot] com” or other things like that which never seem unbiased or very informational.

Some background: I work for a small tv/film/commercial production and post-production company. We’ve been hosting with a small company but we need to switch due to a multitude of factors in which they no longer fit our needs. If anyone can suggest or recommend a good company that fits our needs, or a place where I can start more thorough research that’d be great!

Currently we just need to host three separate sites (three different URL’s). I think only two of the three sites are really active. Our main site is the production company, the other two are for film products we’ve developed. For our main site we currently have a Flash site but we’re going to be moving to some sort of CMS back end for a new site, either Expression Engine or WordPress, depending on who we get to design the site.

Our immediate pressing need is FTP. We put up a lot of video via FTP for client review, mostly H264/Flash stuff with bandwidths ranging from 700-5000 kb/s, average of 1300 kb/s per file. We also transfer larger stuff around and our clients need to sometimes transfer large files to us, sometimes these can be upwards of a gig or more. Currently we only get 60-80 kb/s for upload even though we have a 6 up connection. I can get around 600-800 kb/s to my personal site hosted via Dreamhost from our location. It’s painful to wait minutes for a 5 MB file to upload, and even more painful when our client have to wait a long time for that same file to stream so they can review it.

That’s our main need, and in addition to that email is a big one. We currently have an Exchange server, but we’re not really tied to that. We have pretty small caps on our email and we exceed the limit on an almost daily basis sometimes when we get sent lots of attachments. Some boxes have a 100 MB limit. So, larger email limits would be nice.

I’m not really an IT person, just know enough to be dangerous/stupid depending on which side you’re looking at. So, something easy to manage would be great. Ideally a minimal layer of management would be best, but I can deal with learning the basics if need be.

Other than that it’s your usuals like uptime, quick loading sites, fast streaming, etc. All that stuff clients love and take for granted!

Just so you know, so far I’ve researched Media Temple, Dreamhost/Alchemy, InMotion, A Small Orange and a few others. Thanks for taking the time to read this if you’ve gotten this far! I appreciate any and all help!

Andrew

SnoorkAdvertiser replied: As you may notice Dreamhost, InMotion, and other hosting providers that offer unlimited disk space and bandwidth may not be the right solution for you. Those hosting companies are overselling their servers which may cause difficulties such as speed decrease.

Try looking at web hosting companies that do not offer unlimited disk space and bandwidth. I would recommend checking the offers section and you will find decent deals on hosting services.

Also do you maybe know how much disk space and bandwidth you would require? Also what is the budget you are aiming for?

a2visual replied: Totally forgot to mention those, it looks like we use an average of 4 GB/month bandwidth, with some spikes up to 8 GB/month. The total size of our main site is ~27 GB’s (most of which are files that can probably be deleted), the other two being very negligible.

As for budget, I think $50-60/month would be the very top-end, with $20-30/month being more comfortable, though I don’t know if that’s realistic or not for our needs.

SnoorkAdvertiser replied: 8 GB bandwidth is very low considering 27 GB disk space usage. Based on the bandwidth usage, you would be perfectly fine in a shared hosting environment, but based on the disk space usage, shared hosting environment may not be the right choice.

I see you have a pretty decent budget for a VPS server. For $40 – $60 a month you could get a pretty decent VPS server that will meet your requirements.

Also would you require a managed provider or unamnaged provider?

Managed – Hosting company will be taking care of your service such as upgrades and problem resolution.

Unmanaged – You will be taking care of your service in an event that a problem arises with the service.

a2visual replied: Good to know. I think the 27 GB of disk space used is due to leaving old Quicktimes and such online and never really cleaning up the server. It’s on my to-do list.

What about FTP? Do most VPS’ offer fast FTP? That’s a big one.

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