A friend of mine is looking for a hosting provider that can provide fixed bandwidth access and immense amount of storage (terabytes) – anyone know if such a service exists, or is this going to be a dedicated hosting type thing?
I’ve exhaustively searched webhosts for various needs about once a year for the last four years, and I’ve never seen a service offer a terabyte of storage, even in their “normal” dedicated server rigs. However, finding over a terabyte of bandwidth isn’t terribly difficult.
Perhaps a colocation would be a better solution, where they provide everything up to the network cable to be plugged into your friend’s server (ie the “real estate”)?
Yeah, looks like colo is the key. What I’m tentatively suggesting to him is that he look into building a beefy-as-hell 4U rack box with an array of 250GB S-ATA drives (mirrored, of course), redundant PSUs, and all that, and then pay for a fixed bandwidth connection. Probably about $250/month w/ 1Mbps from what I gather.
If anyone has suggestions for good colo facilities, I’d like to hear them. I have one near me, http://www.capitalinternet.com, whom I’ve used in the past, but their facilities were a little, er, ghetto. Functional, but definitely lacking in the palm reader, eye scanner, armed security guard action that you see in the top tier colo facilities.