Ars Technica used DreamHost to serve iPhone video
The insanely popular blog website Ars Technica (the 7th most popular blog in the world according to Technorati) recently did an iPhone review including a 5 minute video with their attempts to destroy the phone (sound like something Josh would have done).
The interesting thing, DreamHost wise, is that one of their writers, Clint Ecker, tells how he temporarily uploaded the video to his own DreamHost account, but forgot to update the link before publishing the post on Ars Technica. Within two days nearly 6000 people had watched the video and consequently eaten up 471 GB of bandwidth.
It’s nice to see that DreamHost can serve nearly half a terabyte of video for one of the busiest blogs in the world without a hiccup. I think the people who claim that DreamHost would never actual honor their generous storage and bandwidth limits are proven wrong hereby.
Any of you readers getting close to your bandwidth limits?
July 25th, 2007 at 11:43
Yes, I’m serving videos on my site http://adsoftheworld.com from Dreamhost and I’m getting to my 4000GB dedicated hosting limit every month.
July 25th, 2007 at 11:51
> The insanely popular blog Ars Technica
Dude… Ars Technica ain’t no blog! They’re a full-blow technology website, with big reviews and in-depth stories on science, tech and politics. Ars does in fact include a bunch of blogs (of their editors and journalists), but that’s just part of the whole package.
Don’t insult them by calling it a blog
July 25th, 2007 at 11:53
I can say without hesitation that DreamHost does in fact honor its limits, and in some cases, has even gone above and beyond those limits. The problem most people complain about involves hitting other limitations of their hosting contract, such as excessive CPU or database usage. The fact is that most websites are not designed to scale well, including major production software such as phpBB or Joomla. This tends to be even worse on self-made websites, even when using a framework like Ruby on Rails.
The Ars Technica story is an excellent example of the usage of bandwidth that scales well — all that needed to be served was a large video file. There was no database queries on the back end, no PHP application generating pages.. just a simple flash video file. Because of this, they were able to use a large amount of their bandwidth allowance without running into other issues.
Scaling is a huge topic in computing, and many regular people don’t even realize they need to invest in scaling technologies when their website becomes highly popular. They become upset when they get shut down for disrupting their server, and point to their bandwidth usage as being nowhere near the limit. This is where the majority of complaints come from.
Simple, introductory-level scalability technologies include things like WordPress Cache.. middle-level solutions are more complicated, like memcached (which is not always suitable for shared hosting.. it might be time to get a dedicated server!) High-end solutions typically involve multiple and special hardware like load balancers, at this point you should be renting or co-locating space in a data center.
Hope that’s informative.
July 25th, 2007 at 12:02
Awesome for picking this up. Didn’t even know there was such a thing as an unofficial dreamhost blog
July 25th, 2007 at 14:07
AdsOfTheWorld.com – Love your site! Didn’t know you were hosted by DreamHost. Maybe I could do an interview with you sometime?!
Cailin – I stand corrected! Technorati fooled me…
Sabrejack – Thanks for your reply. Just want to emphasize that I personally always belived that DreamHost would honour your limits, but I’ve often heard the claim that it simple wouldn’t be possible with your prices. Same people who always screams overselling! Damn naysayers
Clint – Welcome to the blog! We’ve been around for more than 1½ years now…
July 25th, 2007 at 16:21
Awesome
Nice find, Unofficial DreamHost Blog.
July 25th, 2007 at 16:36
@ Clint:
For shame! Especially since it was you who got me enthused about DreamHost to begin with
July 31st, 2007 at 04:44
Sabrejack, that’s very informative. thanks! Maybe it would be good if DreamHost emphasized this. Because, if you hear complaints, you indeed only hear the bandwidth story …
August 3rd, 2007 at 23:36
I too can say that Dreamhost does honor their bandwidth quotas. At least to an extent. I have a file mirror (yep. It just has files — no actual website) that chews through 350GB per month easy. Granted that is no where near the 6TB limit I have right now but come on! The site right now is linked at the Cygwin project website as an official mirror and also has an entry right in the installer for those people to use it. It also gets updated so apparently the anywhere from 5 second to 2 minute long cron job isn’t doing any harm to anyone.