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One example of direct media hosting that I have done, more than once, is of audio files. Far larger than an image. These were full MP3 and, if you can remember these, Ogg Vorbis files. Yes, there was a website somewhere that referenced them so that you could learn about them, but the purpose, the context of them, was not to be part of a page but to be directly linked to and downloaded or streamed. The web page was only to make them discoverable as you would never know about them otherwise. There was a directory that if you knew it was there would list them, but that was it.
The secret to doing this safely is either.. not have songs that are that popular or to have an unmetered connection so that you can't be surprised by the cost. I had both of these failsafes.
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Dear leaders of the People's Democratic Republic of MangoLassi,
Directly hotlinking to images is generally considered poor internet manners in the circles I've run in, but that doesn't seem to be universal so I won't argue that.
More pragmatically, hotlinking allows someone else to effectively embed arbitrary content on your site should they so desire. This introduces the potential for performance and security issues you cannot directly control should the image host get vindictive...
Example: if someone notices dog.jpg on their site is getting way more traffic than makes sense, they can replace it with dog1.jpg on their site's links and then do whatever they want with the original image. This can range from introducing performance issues (dog.jpg is now a 10mb photo!) to, if they are truly nasty, embedding malware within the image to be served wherever it's linked.
The chances of this actually happening are pretty low, of course, but it's possible and I don't know if anything could be done on the website to check for changes in what's getting served from hotlinks.
I'm hoping the NodeBB devs use the Imgur API to automatically upload images linked to and serve that instead. That would eliminate the bandwidth concerns as well as the potential revenge issues.
I'd appreciate some sort of option to turn topic icons off in the meantime, but I also understand it would probably be a lot of work to add that in if NodeBB doesn't already provide it!
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
So you're saying it's nearly impossible for someone today who has a $100 year hosting bill, that it's nearly impossible for them to get a $1500 bill next month because someone linked to a file on my site that goes viral?
Just remember that this applies to all files, not just images.
That is why I used the word file, not image
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
So you're saying it's nearly impossible for someone today who has a $100 year hosting bill, that it's nearly impossible for them to get a $1500 bill next month because someone linked to a file on my site that goes viral?
Just remember that this applies to all files, not just images.
That is why I used the word file, not image
Right
But then it means all linking would be bad. Which is the entire point of the web. Without linking, we'd just use FTP servers. -
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
So you're saying it's nearly impossible for someone today who has a $100 year hosting bill, that it's nearly impossible for them to get a $1500 bill next month because someone linked to a file on my site that goes viral?
Of course that is possible. All it takes is going for the wrong type of connection. Anyone can get any bad ISP agreement and then host on it. But they would get screw even more if people were going to the "full page" rather than just an image in that case too, as even more content would be pulled. So the $1500 bill might be $1800!
But if you have a concern around that you don't use metered connections or have a throttle or monitor logs or whatever. There are options. Web hosting is an option pass time, tracking your bandwidth or using connections that can't explode is just part of doing that.
Same with telephony. Do you pay for incoming calls? You might want to restrict the rate at which you can receive them.
And this is why many services like this have gone to unlimited solutions, rate limited perhaps, but otherwise unlimited.
I'll admit I haven't looked into that type of option for web hosting, nor do I ever see it advertised on SMB type web hosts - instead I see it advertised that you get something like 100 GB of bandwidth a month, etc.
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@WingCreative said:
I'm hoping the NodeBB devs use the Imgur API to automatically upload images linked to and serve that instead. That would eliminate the bandwidth concerns as well as the potential revenge issues.
I'm not sure that's really an option. You could find yourself in copyright violation once you make a copy of someone else's image without their permission and serve it up to the web.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
So you're saying it's nearly impossible for someone today who has a $100 year hosting bill, that it's nearly impossible for them to get a $1500 bill next month because someone linked to a file on my site that goes viral?
Of course that is possible. All it takes is going for the wrong type of connection. Anyone can get any bad ISP agreement and then host on it. But they would get screw even more if people were going to the "full page" rather than just an image in that case too, as even more content would be pulled. So the $1500 bill might be $1800!
But if you have a concern around that you don't use metered connections or have a throttle or monitor logs or whatever. There are options. Web hosting is an option pass time, tracking your bandwidth or using connections that can't explode is just part of doing that.
Same with telephony. Do you pay for incoming calls? You might want to restrict the rate at which you can receive them.
And this is why many services like this have gone to unlimited solutions, rate limited perhaps, but otherwise unlimited.
I'll admit I haven't looked into that type of option for web hosting, nor do I ever see it advertised on SMB type web hosts - instead I see it advertised that you get something like 100 GB of bandwidth a month, etc.
Things like A Small Orange meter you but then cut you off. If you need more, you buy it. They will email you so that you have a warning. So no surprises, at least no big ones.
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If you do big hosting you can easily get things like 100Mb/s from a datacenter or buy it by the TB like many of us do. It's cheap. To get to $1500 you would have to have quite the pipe. That is like a 100Mb/s saturated from a top datacenter for a full year
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Vultr has 1TB and so does MNX.io (my old cloud server provider). MNX charges $0.10 per GB over, that's a crazy amount of data in a month to get to $1500.
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@johnhooks said:
Vultr has 1TB and so does MNX.io (my old cloud server provider). MNX charges $0.10 per GB over, that's a crazy amount of data in a month to get to $1500.
And what is the bandwidth rate? You can only pump so much over a normal connection.
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I guess that is about 32TB per month if you can run 100Mb/s continuous without a break, ever. Is that correct? Did I get that math right?
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I'm sure the $1500 bill was from a decade ago when bandwidth was considerably more expensive, or from a place that just rapes it's customers because it can.
So it's sounding like with a colo or other hosted solutions the price really has come down so significantly as to make this not matter.
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@Dashrender said:
So it's sounding like with a colo or other hosted solutions the price really has come down so significantly as to make this not matter.
As long as you are planning for it, yeah. Considering a full colo with the rack, power, Internet, TBs of transfer, etc. is all $50/mo...
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
So it's sounding like with a colo or other hosted solutions the price really has come down so significantly as to make this not matter.
As long as you are planning for it, yeah. Considering a full colo with the rack, power, Internet, TBs of transfer, etc. is all $50/mo...
$50/month for a 1 or 2 U spot?
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
So it's sounding like with a colo or other hosted solutions the price really has come down so significantly as to make this not matter.
As long as you are planning for it, yeah. Considering a full colo with the rack, power, Internet, TBs of transfer, etc. is all $50/mo...
$50/month for a 1 or 2 U spot?
1U, 2U is normally a little more. $65 or so.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@johnhooks said:
Vultr has 1TB and so does MNX.io (my old cloud server provider). MNX charges $0.10 per GB over, that's a crazy amount of data in a month to get to $1500.
And what is the bandwidth rate? You can only pump so much over a normal connection.
When I had it, I was getting around 20 Mbps when doing updates and such, not sure what the actual reported limit is.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
So it's sounding like with a colo or other hosted solutions the price really has come down so significantly as to make this not matter.
As long as you are planning for it, yeah. Considering a full colo with the rack, power, Internet, TBs of transfer, etc. is all $50/mo...
$50/month for a 1 or 2 U spot?
1U, 2U is normally a little more. $65 or so.
Where are you hosting?
I really need to look into the cost of colo'ing if that's all it is! I guess I need 8U = around $260/month or $3120/yr... and that includes 100 Mb internet...
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
So it's sounding like with a colo or other hosted solutions the price really has come down so significantly as to make this not matter.
As long as you are planning for it, yeah. Considering a full colo with the rack, power, Internet, TBs of transfer, etc. is all $50/mo...
$50/month for a 1 or 2 U spot?
1U, 2U is normally a little more. $65 or so.
Where are you hosting?
I really need to look into the cost of colo'ing if that's all it is! I guess I need 8U = around $260/month or $3120/yr... and that includes 100 Mb internet...
You get better rates getting a quarter or half rack. This is with 3Z in Canada.
Ask @chrisl as he may have insight for you in the US, he is with Colocation America.
Colo is definitely so cheap that it is well worth it in nearly all cases.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
So it's sounding like with a colo or other hosted solutions the price really has come down so significantly as to make this not matter.
As long as you are planning for it, yeah. Considering a full colo with the rack, power, Internet, TBs of transfer, etc. is all $50/mo...
$50/month for a 1 or 2 U spot?
1U, 2U is normally a little more. $65 or so.
Where are you hosting?
I really need to look into the cost of colo'ing if that's all it is! I guess I need 8U = around $260/month or $3120/yr... and that includes 100 Mb internet...
You get better rates getting a quarter or half rack. This is with 3Z in Canada.
Ask @chrisl as he may have insight for you in the US, he is with Colocation America.
Colo is definitely so cheap that it is well worth it in nearly all cases.
We have several really nice DCs here in Omaha. We aren't on any fault lines, decent power grid, good ground, etc for datacenters.
Though the last time I asked for pricing, it was like $200/U and I don't know that that included internet access.
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that's why you don't colo "local". Just like most services today, location means little and providers use that as an opportunity to hold at ransom people who think that it is. you don't want "far away" with colo, but Chicago, Dallas, St. Louis, Houston and even Toronto and Fesno aren't bad for you.
