Hosting / server Question

[Flatmate]

I am just about to commision a web designer to produce my website, We need a top website server hosting package in place as the website is planned to attract over 500 thousand visits in the 1st year, the web site will have a customer data base, show pictures, video and adverts
My Questions are that i'm new to servers and hosting

I see my hosting fees to be expensive

Whats the difference with me buying my own server?

What should one approx cost for my spec?

Does the price i've been quoted sound ok?

Who are the best hosting companys?

I have been quoted

Dedicated website hosting
Dual core xeon processor
1 GB Memory
500GB HDD
500GB Monthly bandwidth
For £250 +VAT

Thanks for anyones advice

[ken_uk]

1. How do you plan on getting 500 thousand visitors in the first year?
2. What sort of content? How much bandwidth per customer visit do you expect on average? Are they short clips, long videos, etc.. Work out the bandwidth per customer, multiply that by the number of customers and then you will have a rough idea of how much bandwidth you need a month (but I would allocate a lot more, as you need to upload the stuff, manage it, and also have spare available for busy periods).
3. New to servers and hosting means you will need a fully managed solution, so buying your own server would be a waste of time unless you purchase a fully managed support solution to go with it. You will need people onsite to look after the maintainance of the server if you are unable to do it yourself.
4. If your planning on that many visitors in the first year, what numbers are you planning for subsequent years, if your serious about this you need a solution that is scaleable (not just the hosting, but the actual backend software needs to be scaleable, a webdesigner using a off the shelf script may not have the experience required for a large scale enterprise.

[leemason]

If you were to buy your own server then you would still probably pay something like this:

£50.00 per 1U for rack space (inc. single power feed)
£50.00 per 1Mb/sec per month

If you wanted to use your own server I would also suggest that you get a decent firewall to put in front of it. The server spec is not high. What is the Operating System. if it's Linux thats OK as you can install that for free but if it's Windows you will have to purchase that as well.

I would guess that a decent firewall would probably cost you about £300.00 with a server of the spec required costing about £900.00. To host this you would need 2U of space. You would also need to support the server yourself, do your own backups (you might need to do this anyway), and get some sort of hardware maintenance on it. All in all you wouldn't save much but getting a DIY job done.

[Flatmate]

Basicly our site is backed up by a powerful marketing campaign, we were looking for a server that could run effectively under the pressure of customers using the site without running slow and putting customers off most, people i have spoken to say it would cost around £300 - £500 a month, the videos would only be short max one minute and is not the core of the site and would only be used by 10% of users

Thanks again

[KM-Tiger]

.........we were looking for a server that could run effectively under the pressure of customers using the site without running slow and putting customers off most, people i have spoken to say it would cost around £300 - £500 a month

They are probably right.

At this stage you do well to pin down the spec precisely for both the physical hardware and the level of service from the hosting company, as well as what scalability is possible, as ken-uk suggests.

Then compare the prices of those that can offer that spec.

[steviemac]

I operate a video clip website with around 2,000 visitors a day viewing around 1,500 clips. I have messed around with hosting companies who let me down, until I found www.softlayer.com (http://www.softlayer.com) . These guys are top-notch a totally professional hosting company and the last hosting company I will use. My monthly hosting costs are approx £250 a month - that is for a dedicated server. That is utilising 5,000 GBs a month Bandwidth

If you are going to get that many visitors in your first year (BTW, not sure why you are so confident thats what you will get!) your bandwidth could be huge and therefore very expensive.

if you cut corners on hosting, you will find it is a false economy as when your site grows big, you will outgrow your cheapy hosting and have to migrate a potentially very big site to another hosting company. That is a real headache

[Dwebs-Ltd]

I am just about to commision a web designer to produce my website, We need a top website server hosting package in place as the website is planned to attract over 500 thousand visits in the 1st year, the web site will have a customer data base, show pictures, video and adverts
My Questions are that i'm new to servers and hosting

I see my hosting fees to be expensive

Whats the difference with me buying my own server?

What should one approx cost for my spec?

Does the price i've been quoted sound ok?

Who are the best hosting companys?

I have been quoted

Dedicated website hosting
Dual core xeon processor
1 GB Memory
500GB HDD
500GB Monthly bandwidth
For £250 +VAT

Thanks for anyones advice

A. I assume that price is for a managed box and per month if not i hope its for something super special
B. What OS are you using?
C. Don't think buying your own server is simple yes it may cost £50p/m to put it in a datacenter but if something fails you have to pay remote hands to fix it which usually is £75 per hour - £150 per hour depending on the time of day. Unless you are going to visit the data center yourself and even then you may need to pay for escorted access.

Decent dell box you would spend up to £1k for a single unit plus any license costs.

Example box with us

Dell Poweredge R300
Intel Xeon X3353 Quad Core 2.66Ghz 12Mb Cache 1333FSB
2Gb DDR2 667Mhz ECC Memory (Up to 24Gb supported)
500Gb SATA2 16Mb Cache
Windows 2003 Standard 32bit or 64bit
1,000Gb Per Month Bandwidth
24x7 Phone Support
1min Interval External Monitoring
99.95% Network Uptime SLA
4hr Hardware Replacement SLA
100% Fully Managed you don't have to do anything apart from upload your data and run your app.
£239 Per Month
£50 Setup

or

£2,599 Per Year
FREE Setup

Add second 500Gb Hard Drive and Raid 1 for £50 extra per month.

[steviemac]

also forgot to recommend ths server managment company -

http://www.platinumservermanagement.com/


they can manage your server for a fantastic monthly price

[Dwebs-Ltd]

also forgot to recommend ths server managment company -

http://www.platinumservermanagement.com/


they can manage your server for a fantastic monthly price

But as always you get what you pay for, I suppose any level of support for £15 isn't too bad!

"We offer and guarantee an initial response within 6 hours, and subsequent responses and resolutions within 24 hours, per ticket. However, our average response time is within 1 hour, and our average resolution time is within 3 hours. Tickets are reviewed in the order they are received, and answered consecutively.

Our Response and Resolution time guarantees apply to the first 1 ticket per day, or the first 15 tickets per month, or the first 30 replies per month, whichever comes first, and additional tickets are not covered under our Response and Resolution time guarantees. A "response" means that a technician has read the ticket, assigned it to the most appropriate technician to handle your specific problem, and responded stating that the ticket resolution process has started.

Nevertheless, we only offer and guarantee that an initial response will be received within 6 hours, and subsequent responses and resolutions will be received within 24 hours. Therefore, for example, whether you receive a response in 1 minute, and a resolution in 23 hours, it is still within our offered and guaranteed response and resolutions times.) "

[steviemac]

I have used them for months, as you say £15 a month for that level of service is nothing short of excellent. They are highly recommended by other customers as well

[Dwebs-Ltd]

I have used them for months, as you say £15 a month for that level of service is nothing short of excellent. They are highly recommended by other customers as well

What you use is your choice but the problem I see is if at 3am something goes wrong and your customers sites are offline, the management company are super busy and it takes 6hrs for them to respond that brings you to 9am. After the initial response that says we are working on the issue it can take them up to 24hrs to get back to you. So you could be waiting up to 30hrs for your customers sites to be online and there would be nothing under their terms you can do about it.

If I did that to a client we would be out of business if something breaks at 3am we are usually notified automatically depending on the client's setup we work on the issue straight away if its hardware related we get the DC to fix the problem or get an engineer on site if its software we work on the issue until its fixed and call in assistance from the software vendor if need be

All down to client requirements but if we left them without service for 24hrs they wouldn't want to be our client.

[UKSBD]

My directory has a database of 50,000 businesses, another database of about
5,000, a database for a Wordpress blog, receives approx 400,000 visitors a
month, has loads of images loaded, and I only pay £60 a year.

It is on a shared server, but I seldom have problems.
Why do prices vary so much?

[Dwebs-Ltd]

My directory has a database of 50,000 businesses, another database of about
5,000, a database for a Wordpress blog, receives approx 400,000 visitors a
month, has loads of images loaded, and I only pay £60 a year.

It is on a shared server, but I seldom have problems.
Why do prices vary so much?

All down to what the site is doing if your just pulling content it can be cached easily and if well constructed your databases should fly.

If the site for example is playing with video uploads or user interactivity then it may require more resources.

The OP may actually only need shared hosting but until we get some more info on the website / application its hard to tell sometimes developers way over estimate what is required, some create poorly coded sites that kill the hosts systems others underestimate the resources required.

We have business clients that don't have heavy load sites but still require a managed server for various reasons i.e. client security, guaranteed resources and performance etc.

We setup a client at the end of August with a fully managed box to host a vBulletin forum with around 5,000 users and 700 active users plus they had 6-8 other sites to host. Mid end Xeon Dual Core with windows 2003 32bit + PHP FastCGI and MySQL 5.0 with some quite heavy tweaks to the config to help with caching etc and the forum flies far faster than their previous host and everyone says "ooooh windows don't work you need linux". Not a super cheap solution but as far as I'm aware no complaints :)

Looking at the graphs server averages less than 10% CPU Usage over two cores and 1Gb of ram

[steviemac]

re Platinum management, I have always found they have responded within an hour to any requests. 3am is a good time for something to go wrong, as they are US based ;)

They were recommended to me by others. Anyone can research them if they have doubts.

[AdvinBiz]

I would suggest looking at something that will do you the first 6-months planned visits rather than the first year. That way costs will match visits and I presume revenue. Just make sure you can upgrade at the 6-month point if you are hitting target.

There is nothing worse than paying for a massive server with huge bandwidth then having a handful of visits.

[F1SEO]

I would also recommend that before outlaying on serious hosting you investigate companies that offer expansion plans as you need them. A decent shared hosting will get you off the ground and after a few months you'll know whether you need something bigger and better. If you choose the the right hosting company they can move accounts onto more powerful servers as your require.

A decent shared server will be in the range of £30-£100 a year with full management and updates - in effect it's all done for you (security updates).

Next step up is what's call a VDS, where you hire a slice of a decent server with larger bandwidth than shared, and you get more CPU time (can run bigger sites). After that it's a dedicated server, which can be fairly expensive but will give you the security of no one else having your IP and the server will only run your stuff and won't get intereference from other people's sites. It's more than likely that if you have VDS/ Dedicated Server that you'll need to maintain it .. and if you can't do it / don't want to do it yourself then you'll need to pay the hosting company a management fee.

It's sometimes tempting to go in at the big end to cover your estimated traffic but in order to maintain tighter control on your outgoings I would definetly recommend upgrading your hosting as necessary. Just make sure that you find a hosting company you can trust and can work with.

[stugster]

Whatever you decide, make sure you get a range of quotes from all different companies and seriously investigate how easy it is to get in contact with them.

[Webcatch]

I use a company called CWCS based in nottingham. Very professional outfit and great customer service.

[nickpp]

I had a server in cwcs and it burnt out, Had over 2 days of total downtime and I was even using a third party support company also. In 13 years of being involved in commercial internet I had never had a colo server burnout. i was told they had 'Servers popping Everywhere'

[Dwebs-Ltd]

I had a server in cwcs and it burnt out, Had over 2 days of total downtime and I was even using a third party support company also. In 13 years of being involved in commercial internet I had never had a colo server burnout. i was told they had 'Servers popping Everywhere'

Was it a custom build piece of colo kit or a branded server?

[nickpp]

one of their standard servers, fully managed. Moved to them to cut costs from the old globix DS. Had a total nightmare. The server was managed for me also. Moved to another DS now.

[nickpp]

Cheapest is most certainly never the best...Lost a lot of customers due to this.

[Dwebs-Ltd]

one of their standard servers, fully managed. Moved to them to cut costs from the old globix DS. Had a total nightmare. The server was managed for me also. Moved to another DS now.

Depends on the kit they use then if they use cheap boxes i.e. custom build stuff then they will go bang unless they have built them to a high spec. If its branded kit i.e. Dell / HP they don't go bang that often only had 1 go in 4 years.

[nickpp]

It was a dell box, it was due to some power issues I was led to believe as a few went. It actually burnt out totally wrecking both drives.

[Dwebs-Ltd]

It was a dell box, it was due to some power issues I was led to believe as a few went. It actually burnt out totally wrecking both drives.

Not exactly believable, depends on your definition of burnt out.

PSU's do go pop now and again but if the box was overheating they should have known. Dell makes it super easy to monitor temp's etc.

If the drives died it can happen but usually with the higher end SATA Enterprise or SAS drives you don't get it.

[nickpp]

Viewed box myself, something very bad had happened to it. Strong burnt smell.

[nickpp]

It had not burst into flames obviously :)