Hi guys,

I have recently paid a web designer to make me a website. It is kind of a youtube-with-a-twist kind of website, where people submit their own videos.

It has not yet gone LIVE, but it is currently being hosted by the designer on one of his home machines. But now, he says that when it goes live, he might have trouble with all the people trying to view videos that are being hosted at his house - limited bandwidth I guess.

So he has been telling me about a server than he knows about that could handle the bandwidth of my website.

I would simply like to post the spec of the server here and have someone who knows more about this stuff than I do, let me know if this would be a reasonable price to pay:

SPEC:

Processor (CPU) : Quad Core XEON 2.5Ghz     
Hard Drive : 2x250 GB SATA (250 GB Usable Space)     
Memory (RAM) : 8 GB   
Hardware RAID: Yes - RAID 1 Mirroring   
Remote Reboot : Yes - One Click Reboot           
Bandwidth : Unlimited 10 Mbps Data Pipe           
Internet Connections : Multiple Tier 1 Carriers     
IP Addresses : 2 Free. Additional for Fee           
Bandwidth Graphs and Reporting : Yes   
Operating System Services : CentOS 5 
Operating System Choice : CentOS       
Web Based Administration : cPanel/WHM         
Webserver : Apache     
Mail Server : EXIM         
FTP Server : ProFTP     
Database : MySQL       
Programming Languages : PHP, Perl & Python   
Name Server (DNS): Bind or use ours     
Root/Administration Access : Yes         
Technical Support : Yes 24x7x365         
Personal System Admin : Yes - Chargeable

He is asking for around £170 ($260) per month. Is this reasonable? Is this spec roughly what I would need? I have no idea how many video / how much traffic - it depends on how many users and how successful the site. I would be happy if we got like 200 videos on there and 1000 people looking in one day for example - I wouldn't expect any more than that for the first few months at least.

Thank you for your help!!I have never ever paid that kind of money for a server. I rink you mean monthly rent. Is that right. Prices vary widely. For 10mpbs a Xenon  CPU and a RAID is typical.
But I do not have any experience. Out of my league.

Check around and see what the going prices are.
If you have the name of the principal domain of the company, look it up on WOT. Of course, WOT does not ate the quality of servers, but it may provide a clue as to the integrity of the vendor.  h
http://www.mywot.com/

Here are two more  suggestions.
1. Contact Dell by PHONE and ask them for a quote. They rent servers.
2. Search Google  "rent for 10 mbps server" (no quotes).

There was one who had a Mac as a server real cheap.
And some companies that claim they are going out of business and they want you to take over the server. Be careful!

The are people all over the world that want your business! Here are just two well known,
http://1and1.com
http://rankspace.com
Be aware many give rack space a poor rating.
Here is one you may seldom hear about (my commendation):
http://34sp.comthank you very much for the info.. I will follow it all up!

Since my post, I was wondering - what about just using a hosting website? Is this called shared hosting? If I paid for a good package, would they be able to accommodate my needs?

Thank you :-)Yes, shared hosteling works good when you need to scale your business. You start out with a small  amount of bandwidth and then increase it as needed. There are so many of thies, it is hard to make a specific recommendation.
The few time nI wanted ton put video on my web site, I did it indirectly. Sires such as You Tube and others let you post on their site. The you can link to their page as a "frame" that seems to be coming from your site. Of course, hour videos arena longer exclusive, But you visitors may not even realize it. Later, you can get your own video streaming, which takes bandwidth.
I use HostGator.com, which allows me unlimited storage and bandwidth for $5/month.

I'm not exactly sure of the bandwidth rate, or the server specs, but everything has been pretty great for all of my websites.
I would RECOMMEND checking it out.

In any case, I WOULD NOT pay that much until you get a LOT more info.  That sounds extremely unreasonable.

Hope it works out well for you,
-rockerestDecent server specs, however way over priced. Also, as you will be hosting videos you will soon start running out of storage space if the site picks up.

Seeing as you posted the price in £ then ($), im guessing your based in the UK? Then i would suggest http://www.rapidswitch.com/dedicatedservers.aspx (Their bronze package). As that will easily keep your site running until your getting about 10,000 users a day.
You need to research this.

A quick search bought up http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/dedicatedservers/compare/