Becoming a web hoster?

[MASSEY]

Say you have got a website, for good loading times you can expect to pay 40 quid a year on one site give or take a few.

If you have 10 websites your getting into 400 quid a year, would it not be cheaper in the long run, to try and host your own websites or is there far far more to it thn that.?
:|

[Raw Rob]

Once you've got a few websites you want to host you can get a VPS (Virtual Private Server) on which you can host unlimited* websites for a set price. And when you need even more server space/power you can move up to a dedicated server.

* theoretically, obviously you have to take disk space and bandwidth into consideration

Rob

[sanjiv]

You would not neccesarily need 10 hosting accounts for 10 websites. You would get one hosting account and put 10 websites on one account. The web host would usually give storage and bandwidth upgrades for cheaper than creating a new account.

It could be £40 for one site or £120 for 10 sites. Some web hosts even provide account with unlimited storage, bandwidth and everything else for cheap so it would cost you now more to host more websites.

The £40 figure is variable depending on your requirements and the £120 figure was just an example as I have seen a web host charging three times as much for 10 times as much storage and bandwidth.

^ excluding the cost of the domain name.

EDIT: This is for shared hosting. Obviously as you become bigger, you would want to switch to VPS and Dedicated as Rob says.

[TheWebDesigner]

Alternatively the new Cloud Hosting Products might help you out.

Cheap, Scaleable and allow for unlimited clients.

The problems with dedicated servers are they have limits, and are costly £100+ a month, the ones at £50 a month are too good to be true.

Once you get enough clients might be worth looking into buying server space directly from the data centres.

Very costly but the returns are pretty good.

Basically you become the guys who sell joe bloggs "RESELLER" packages.

Cut out the middle man so to speak.

Then eventually you can put your own equiptment into those datacentre racks and manage the servers.

Becoming a true Hosting Company.

Al

[MASSEY]

You would not neccesarily need 10 hosting accounts for 10 websites. You would get one hosting account and put 10 websites on one account. The web host would usually give storage and bandwidth upgrades for cheaper than creating a new account.

It could be £40 for one site or £120 for 10 sites. Some web hosts even provide account with unlimited storage, bandwidth and everything else for cheap so it would cost you now more to host more websites.

The £40 figure is variable depending on your requirements and the £120 figure was just an example as I have seen a web host charging three times as much for 10 times as much storage and bandwidth.

^ excluding the cost of the domain name.

EDIT: This is for shared hosting. Obviously as you become bigger, you would want to switch to VPS and Dedicated as Rob says.

So basically you get a massive prce reduction, thats good to know. thankyou.

[Investors-Wanted]

Hi Massy

I would avoid setting up with companies that offer unimited webspace, acounts etc. I did have one of these acounts once, but the problem was that they was always becoming overloaded and the site would go down.

I have used heart internet before and they offered a good service.

[sanjiv]

Hi Massy

I would avoid setting up with companies that offer unimited webspace, acounts etc. I did have one of these acounts once, but the problem was that they was always becoming overloaded and the site would go down.

I have used heart internet before and they offered a good service.
I used to have an unlimited web hosting account based in the US who I never had any problems with however I didn't really use up much space or bandwidth.

[Investors-Wanted]

I used to have an unlimited web hosting account based in the US who I never had any problems with however I didn't really use up much space or bandwidth.


Some in the US are very good, If you can why dont you find a reseller which offers a trial. I must admit the one I used offer the unlimited service for $6/month. I guess you get wehat you pay for.

[sanjiv]

The one I got was 3$ per month. I suppose the reason I didn't use it much though was because it was with the shared IP address and there were many many other dodgy sites on the same IP address. It is sometimes a tad slow.

The one I used was byethost.com

[TheWebDesigner]

The one thing with unlimited is its sold on the pretense you can have your whole company on one package.

I know a major US company who has a UK ranch who does unlimited everything for £13 a month.

They sell it as become a web hoster for £13 a month for life.

Reality is bandwidth, data transfer isnt free, true unlimited doesnt exist.

So be weary, I mentioned scaleable clouds, but they still have bandwidth limits. Unlimited clients as in purchasing multiple packages.

Once your monthly cost exceeds the cost of server racks then change over.

Its like Broadband, FUP (Fair Usage Policy applies)
If there isnt one its too good to be true lol

Al

[bensquare]

hosting cost nowaday is very very affordable ..there are many companys offering so called unlimited domains hosting package for about like £60 a year...unless u have some heavy traffic / "download" web, from my personal experience, I found those unlimited package still do the job pretty well

[stugster]

Let's be honest about it... if you don't understand the technology, then you don't want to be hosting live websites on your own services.

That's not to say don't go away and play with the hosting industry software and tools - but don't expect your website to stay online long if you don't know what you're doing.

There will come times when you're up all night (literally) recovering files from a hacked users account... those times are your real costs.

[Tej]

Everyone wants to cut costs.. and think they can do everything!... somehow it doesn't work like that. Have always said.. let those that do this for a living.. get on with it and earn their living. They are the ones that have spent a lot of time and effort to get their business up and running. Why be a jack of all? ( penny wise, pound foolish, comes to mind)

Someone takes a few taxis in a week to get somewhere.... hey! thats expensive... should I buy a taxi?... work out cheaper in the long run?

:D

[MASSEY]

lol, I just thought it would be cheaper, but it clearly is a bad idea and i shall not be doing it. :D

[Tej]

Good thinking ,my friend

[stugster]

Someone takes a few taxis in a week to get somewhere.... hey! thats expensive... should I buy a taxi?... work out cheaper in the long run?


Love it! :D

[ServWise]

As Stugster has said, unless you know a fair amount about server administration then getting an unmanaged dedicated server or VPS is not going to help you and a managed server is considerably more expensive.

Most shared hosting accounts these days will allow you to host more than 1 website per plan, in our case we don't restrict the amount of websites or mysql databases etc, what we do restrict is Space and Bandwidth so that if you need to host more websites than the space and/or bandwidth quote can handle then you simply upgrade them.

Some hosts will offer Unlimited (or vast amounts of) Space and Bandwidth (called overselling), but as has been said if you want to make sure your website functions tomorrow you would be advised to stay away from these types of plans.

Read my blog post about this very subject at http://www.servwise.com/blog-sam/index.php/2008/08/15/the-truth-about-unlimited-bandwidth-plans/