Following on from the “which host” thread, I thought it would be worth asking the question about bandwidth and storage.
Put simply, if I have all of my videos hosted on Youtube, all of my images hosted on Flickr and all of my download resources hosted on an Amazon S3 storage account, does that significantly reduce my bandwidth?
I’m aware that unlimited hosting doesn’t really mean that, but some of the hosts I’m considering seems to be offering a lot less bandwidth and storage and I’d like to put things in perspective.
If it not being served from your host (stored on the server) it won’t count against your bandwidth or storage with your hosting account.
So anything being stored on s3 YouTube and the like, won’t effect bandwidth.
Also if you use a cloudflare account (even the free one) it will serve ALL your content from their servers (worldwide). So not only does it significantly speed up your website it drops your bandwidth down to next to nothing. You still need the storage for what ever you put on your host, but bandwidth should never be an issue.
Doug is correct. If you serve assets via S3, YouTube, etc. it doesn’t touch your hosting account or consume any bandwidth. It also speeds up your site too.
In my experiences, users don’t consume nearly as much bandwidth. It’s rarely a problem. What’s important here is connectivity and resislency. Providers often don’t have multiple redundant connections to create internet providers. This leaves them vulnerable to networking failure and can slow access.
In general, however, bandwidth concerns can be pretty easily addressed using the methods you describe. Hosting videos on YouTube or Vimeo is a great idea for anyone. Even those “unlimited guys”. It helps with discovering content. I’m sure, for instance, google uses YouTube content to help it drive/understand/learn about a sites seo.
