Use Two Hosting Companies?

Posted by Mel55113 on July 13, 2007 at 2:34am

I'm currently using RimuHosting.com to support several Drupal sites, both single installation and multi-site, under one VPS account. I'm very pleased with their performance, reliability, and support. However, like most VPS solutions storage space and bandwidth is much more limited (and expensive) than it is with the much more common shared hosting accounts provided by vendors like 1and1.com, et al.

Recently I uploaded several rather large WAV and MP3 files that were intended to be shared with a small audience. A "failure in communications" allowed a link to my site to be published on another site. Within two days my bandwidth usage was about 6 times the amount used in the previous month; fortunately we got the link removed before more people took advantage of it.

Now I'm wondering about using a low-cost shared hosting account, one with large storage space and bandwidth allowances, e.g., 1200 GB of space and 12,000 GB of bandwidth for $4.95/mo, simply to host large files. Thus mydomain.com would be hosted at Rimuhosting while data.mydomain.com would be at 1and1. FWIW, Rimuhosting has a very flexible nameserver where I actually have my domain records.

Two questions:

1. Does this seem feasible?

2. Does anyone know if it's possible to configure Drupal (and or IMCE) so that the files directory is on another server?

All help will be greatly appreciated,
Mel

Comments

I'm not sure, but I think

Posted by kvaes on July 13, 2007 at 1:21pm

I'm not sure, but I think you could pull it off with htaccess.
Make a rewrite from /files/ to data.domain.com/files/
Another possibility might be to change autopath function, or hook into your filesystem module.
(all guesses, but those might be options)

http://www.logitouch.be/

Thanks for the idea

Posted by Mel55113 on July 26, 2007 at 12:12am

Since I run on a VPS I have easy access to the Apache configuration file. Instead of using rewrite from htaccess I used a Redirect statement in the virtual server definition. It works really slick.

Now I need to find a better way to manage my files on the other server since TinyMCE/IMCE don't "see" the redirect.

I've been using this for a couple of days and so far have been fairly pleased how well the inexpensive account serves relatively large, 20-30MB, files.

Mel