I know this isn’t something that is anime related, but it is a website update, of sorts. Something that I’ve been thinking about once again is moving the hosting for my anime blog to a new server. There are several reasons for this:
1) I don’t like it being a subdomain of another website. Yes, the main domain is still mine, but now that this site is, for all intents and purposes including the podcast, pulling in around or over 2 GB of bandwidth a month, it may be to the size that it should be moved to it’s own domain name.
2) I had sort of thought of doing that before when setting up with Go Daddy’s podcast service. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize I couldn’t create my own webpage on there, just a little webpage based on pre-supplied templates. That did solve the problem of my podcasts being stored in sever space that I was actually paying for (and not archive.org) but it’s still not in the same area as the blog itself.
There are a few issues with moving, however, as well:
1) Having to set up another redirect for my RSS feed. Even though I’ll probably use the same domain name I currently use for my godaddy podcasting website, they do their RSS feeds kind of weird, so I’d probably change it’s URL. Of course, this means having to set up a redirect for the RSS feed.
2) Changing the actual location of my podcasts. How the GoDaddy service goes, my podcasts aren’t actually saved at www.mydomain.com/podcasts or something, it’s saved on some generic domain. That means I’ll have to go and fix those addresses wherever I have them, and it will probably result in people getting told that all of my past podcasts are “new” when their itunes reads the new feed.
3) I’ll have to redirect everyone from my current website to my new one. That shouldn’t be too much of a bother, though.
There are really three primary issues that I’m facing when selecting a new place to put the website:
1) enough space at a reasonable price. I’m looking for at least 5GB of space for the time being. That will give me enough space that I won’t need to even worry about taking up the space for a few years. By my calcualtions, at how big my podcast files are right now, It’d take something like 60 or 65 podcasts to fill up a gig. My current GoDaddy podcast storage is 1GB large which means that once I get through a year of podcasting, the space will be getting tight, and given that I’ve now already gone past 20 weeks, that thought is creeping up more and more. Also, I don’t want to pay an arm and a leg for service.
2) Enough bandwidth. As I said before, right now the total bandwidth I’m using is about 2GB. The more podcasts I put up and the more popular the blog becomes, the more that is going to increase. To give me enough space, I’m thinking around 100GB of bandwidth. I like having enough bandwidth to allow for, if I use up every byte of space on my hosting, it can be completely downloaded 20 times a month. From the looks of it I may need to pay for more space to get the bandwidth though.
3) Reputable. One of the issues I found when searching for hosts last time was that there is a serious problem in the webhosting community of people offering tons of space and bandwidth to people, but then clamping down on their accounts when they actually dare to use it. If they say that I get 5GB of space with 20GB of bandwidth a month, I want that to be guaranteed, and while I want it relatively inexpensive, I don’t want it packed on a server with so many other sites that it’s down half the time.
Meeting all of these requirements is one reason I’m with my host I am now. However, now that I have a podcast, they just don’t have a plan that gives me enough space for the price I’m looking for (they meet uptime, quality, and bandwidth needs nicely, but to get the actual disk space I’d need, it’d be well over $10 a month - I’d like to keep it under $100 for a year, that’s around $8 a month, if I can).
I have my eye on a couple of hosting services that I’m looking into to see if they are really as good as they sound. Also, even though no one normally comments on this blog (why? doesn’t anyone love me?), if anyone else has suggestions of webhosts that meet my needs, let me know and I’ll be happy to look into them.
