Basically the business is a website that provides temporary storage space for files. There are times when you want to quickly distribute files to your friends or colleagues. For example, you are about to go into a meeting and want to have all the participants see a spreadsheet, but you don’t want to email it to everyone. You could quickly upload it to my site and it will stay there for your friends and colleagues to download. You might want to send your photos to your family far away, but you don’t want to use a photo hosting site because they don’t allow you to download your photos at full resolution. You could upload the pictures to my site and have your family download it.
The deal. The files will basically remain there for only a few days. The default duration when you select an upload will be one or two days. The other choices would be one week, two weeks, and a month. To keep it there for longer than a month you would have to pay like 10 dollars a year.
Pricing. By default you will be allowed to store 1 GB of files for free. If you have a premium account you would get 1GB for $10 a year. Other choices of premium accounts would be 3GB for $20 a year, 5GB for $30 a year, 10GB for $50 a year. Of course this does not consider transfer rates. I don’t know what kind of limit to place on that if any. It may not be needed.
While my plan currently says I will have premium accounts, in reality I might not have premium accounts. I might leave everything to be free and have a 1 GB limit. I am undecided on that.
Limitations. I have been considering various website hosting companies. Many of them offer 300 GB space and 3000GB transfer per month for around $8 per month. While this may sound good enough I cannot know what the caveats are. For example, reading the forums of these sites I found that just about everyone limits emails to no more than 50 per hour. Upon special request it can be increased to 500 outgoing emails per hour. That’s the top limit. I don’t anticipate having to send that many emails. If I do reach that limit, it is probably a good time to upgrade to a more expensive dedicated server account anyway. But the fact that worries me is that they do not mention this “50 emails per hour” limitation in any of their feature lists or Terms and Policies. What else are they hiding that may harm my business?
Concerns. Another fact that causes concern is that if the website has a high CPU utilization then the host will turn off my website. That would be a very bad time to turn off the website. And there is apparently no way to know how much CPU my website is using. Based on the business model I have, I don’t anticipate the CPU load being too much either. Most of the load will be on the storage space.
Learning PHP. Since one of my main aims in having this web site is to learn PHP, I will be looking for a host that supports PHP 5. It looks like many web hosts still only support PHP 4. Apparently there have been great strides in performance improvements and security enhancements from PHP 4 to 5. PHP 6 is on the way and php.net is discontinuing support for PHP 4 at the end of this year.
So essentially if the site is good for the storage and transfer rates they promise, I should be good to go with one of these web hosts that provide plenty of storage for $8 per month. This is for linux based hosts only btw. I will probably go with bluehost.
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