Hi,
My company has been looking at the packages available, and are very nearly ready to purchase a year's worth of the SuperSpecial, while we still can. just a few questions from me about the features the site is now using and will require.
1)mod_rewrite: we use this extensively to format urls and to protect against data-poisoning
2)directories outside of the publicly served html root (php is used to serve these files)
3)ssh access & daily cron jobs - we want to do backups of any newly added data nightly.
4)installing binaries and then running them from php scripts. specifically, we want to use lame to re-encode uploaded mp3 files for lofi preview versions. (don't worry, everything is uploaded by the people who create it - no piracy.) currently we're running lame with a nice level of 19, but as a backgrounded task, so the script can finish without waiting for the encoding to. - there was some vauge language in the use agreement that didn't make clear if this kind of activity (or the backups, for that matter) we're seen as continuously running background processes.
5)should we find that we require (or come to require) features not yet available in the versions of mySQL or php that you have available, is there any recourse as far updating those technologies?
also, more generally, because we are just getting started with this whole online music store thing, we don't know quite what our server loads are going to be, but we'd be upset to see that a sudden surge in interest in our site had pushed your servers too hard for our plan etc - can we expect warnings that we are approaching bandwidth capacity before service is degraded for our users?
thanks again and we look forward to working with you,
Chris