what do you pay?

[euphrosene]

Web Hosting costs and incidentals...

I would greatly appreciate a comparison on hosting fees if any members would be kind enough to share theirs.

If you prefer you can email me at [email protected].

Annual Hosting on floreo.org £100+VAT
Web Stats £40+VAT
Domain Forwarding on euphrosenelabon.com £20+VAT

Many thanks in advance, Euphrosene

PS That includes some support but there is a support contract as well which I have not taken out

 

I use Perfect Hosts in Chester where I live and pay £35 incl. VAT pa to have my site hosted. He forwarded my domain for free when I needed to transfer it. And I get excellent personal support. I don't pay for stats but PH offers that too. I can highly recommend them.

 

[Scott-Copywriter]

Yearly hosting for £100 seems very very expensive. You would only need to pay that kind of price if you required a lot of disk space or a LOT of bandwidth. £40 for the web stats is quite a high price too.

 

[euphrosene]

Hi there Louise - good to see you here!

Thanks. I think I paid 'happily' because I didn't realise I could separate design updates from the hosting side of things (they do both). Now that I have areas that need resolving in the design, I have started to look more closely at what I have been paying over the years...

Euphrosene

 

Hi Euphrosene - I'm trying to work out just how many forums and listservs we are both on!

Have a look on here to get an idea of what PH charge for various things http://www.perfecthosts.co.uk/

You are definitely paying too much. Depending on how much server space you need, prices should start from £20 pa. I know you have a blog too - because a blog is continually expanding, you can expect to pay more for the server space for that, but it still shouldn't be anything like as much as what you've been paying.

 

[euphrosene]

Yearly hosting for £100 seems very very expensive. You would only need to pay that kind of price if you required a lot of disk space or a LOT of bandwidth. £40 for the web stats is quite a high price too.

There is a lot of content but I only upload a daily-ish diary.

The stats are every three days (daily ones are more expensive)

 

[Coding Monkey]

I pay over £3000 a year for my hosting

 

[Scott-Copywriter]

I pay $2.50 per month for 30gb of bandwidth and 500mb of space and I can get complete webstats every second of every day.

You're being ripped off unless you require huge amounts of bandwidth or space.

 

[euphrosene]

I pay $2.50 per month for 30gb of bandwidth and 500mb of space and I can get complete webstats every second of every day.

You're being ripped off unless you require huge amounts of bandwidth or space.

How can I tell how much I will/do need?

I could remove all the ezine archives as they are being turned into a book but mostly it is just text.

I am planning to put my paintings (for sale) on another domain.

 

[euphrosene]

I pay over £3000 a year for my hosting

Ah but how much of that do you offload to your clients Tom?

btw are you an ASP designer?

 

[Coding Monkey]

I pay $2.50 per month for 30gb of bandwidth and 500mb of space and I can get complete webstats every second of every day.

You're being ripped off unless you require huge amounts of bandwidth or space.

I think that's a very shortsighted view on what you're getting when you pay for hosting. It's like saying that for £500 you will get a 10 page website, yet another company charges £2000 for a 5 page one and therefore you're being ripped off.

You're paying an American server company the opportunity to fit hundreds, maybe thousands, of domains onto a single server and then hope nothing goes wrong. You're hoping that they're performing constant back-ups, that someone will be there efficiently if anything does go wrong and that your information is secure.

I have a phone line to a team of experts in charge of my server that has an average waiting queue of 2 seconds; I have an average of 10 minute response to e-mails; I've got a guaranteed hardware replacement within an hour, nightly back-ups, a server on a network with no downtime in 4 years, discounts on SSL certificates, experienced and qualified technicians in UNIX, LAMP and everything that is on the server, along with being able to choose any minute of the day that I want to upgrade anything. All of which is literally available 24x7 365 days a year. And I get offered fantastic opportunities in bringing other clients along, which I would gladly recommend, so if I recommend enough people (about 9), I'll end up paying less than you are now.

 

[Coding Monkey]

Ah but how much of that do you offload to your clients Tom?

btw are you an ASP designer?

Not enough It's more there for the speed of being in the UK and the reliability of the company. I work on every website live, so the time delay to an American server is very noticeable and beyond annoying, so the time saved each day more than makes up for it.

And I'm afraid not. Duane Jackson and DotNetWebs are members of here that program in ASP.

 

[Richard Conyard]

Hosting is one of those things, you pay for what you get. Split out the general costs of a web host (going to do this windows hosting - and leaving loads out).

Web Server: £5,000
Database server: £5,000
Connection fee, rack space, etc. (p.a.): £12,000

This leaves first year costs at £22,000.

For speed and responsiveness say each server is capped at 100 sites, that's £220 p.a. to break even before wages and sundery costs are taken into account.

Of course you can get cheaper servers, cheaper fees on rack space and connectivity. There are lots of ways to make it cheaper to run, but you can't hide from the difference between $2.50 ( about £1.50?) a month and £18.35 a month as the simple example shows.

 

[euphrosene]

Not enough It's more there for the speed of being in the UK and the reliability of the company. I work on every website live, so the time delay to an American server is very noticeable and beyond annoying, so the time saved each day more than makes up for it.

And I'm afraid not. Duane Jackson and DotNetWebs are members of here that program in ASP.

Just spoke with DotNetWebs - my site is 'classic' ASP and the latest version is apparently ASP.net

 

[Scott-Copywriter]

I think that's a very shortsighted view on what you're getting when you pay for hosting. It's like saying that for £500 you will get a 10 page website, yet another company charges £2000 for a 5 page one and therefore you're being ripped off.

You're paying an American server company the opportunity to fit hundreds, maybe thousands, of domains onto a single server and then hope nothing goes wrong. You're hoping that they're performing constant back-ups, that someone will be there efficiently if anything does go wrong and that your information is secure.

I have a phone line to a team of experts in charge of my server that has an average waiting queue of 2 seconds; I have an average of 10 minute response to e-mails; I've got a guaranteed hardware replacement within an hour, nightly back-ups, a server on a network with no downtime in 4 years, discounts on SSL certificates, experienced and qualified technicians in UNIX, LAMP and everything that is on the server, along with being able to choose any minute of the day that I want to upgrade anything. All of which is literally available 24x7 365 days a year. And I get offered fantastic opportunities in bringing other clients along, which I would gladly recommend, so if I recommend enough people (about 9), I'll end up paying less than you are now.

Daily backups is an extra $3 per month. I don't use it however, don't feel the need to.

Obviously if you take into account variables like SSL and special situations then you can charge a lot more. I'm speaking from Euphrosene's point of view and it seems like he doesn't need anything inperticular so he should not need to pay as much. Since you're doing web design etc then you will need support like that (although to be honest if you're not doing specialist work you would only need the 2 second wait phone calls and 10 minute response to E-mails when problems occur, which shouldn't happen anyway if you're paying that kind of money).

I'm just speaking from experience. My webhosting is cheap but I've never had any downtime since I got it almost 2 years ago. Not a single problem, glitch or security issue. I also hardly notice the waiting time for American servers but it depends on the complexity of the website.

Even good UK webhosting costs about £20-£30 per year. Sure if you need it then spending that kind of money is useful but for something lower key and less complex what's the point?

 

[euphrosene]

Hosting is one of those things, you pay for what you get.

In fairness, I should say that I chose to pay for the 'human' touch. There are no ticketing systems. You can ring when necessary.

 

[euphrosene]

I'm speaking from Euphrosene's point of view and it seems like he doesn't need anything inperticular so he should not need to pay as much.

'She' actually

It's one of the Three Graces...

 

[DotNetWebs]

Not enough It's more there for the speed of being in the UK and the reliability of the company. I work on every website live, so the time delay to an American server is very noticeable and beyond annoying, so the time saved each day more than makes up for it.

And I'm afraid not. Duane Jackson and DotNetWebs are members of here that program in ASP.

Just spoke with DotNetWebs - my site is 'classic' ASP and the latest version is apparently ASP.net

Thanks for the mention Tom. I spoke with euphrosene earlier (sorry I had to dash off BTW) . As she points out her site is "classic" ASP and I only deal with ASP.NET nowadays.

Regarding the hosting costs as Tom and Richard point out there is a lot more to web hosting than just bandwidth and space. Also ASP sites by their nature run on Windows servers which generally cost more than Linux servers. You say your existing contract includes some support. It think it really depends on how much 'support' they are giving you.

 

[4dhosting]

The 'pile em high sell em cheap' philosophy of some hosts is giving a false impression that there are very few costs involved with web hosting and so all prices should be pennies per month.

While I agree there is a market for £2 per month (or less) hosting it's not worth operating in (or buying) IMO.

As a provider you'd need to sell thousands of £2 per month accounts to make any decent return then you have the support headaches of managing them, you'll find those paying £2 per month moan *a lot* more when something causes their site to be down for 5 minutes compared to those paying £15-20 per month (or more).

I think what the customer needs to do is sit down and work out how much it will cost them in terms of lost revenue, image, branding, etc for their site or business application to be down for 10 minutes, 2 hours, 1 day, etc and then work out what their budget for hosting is based on that. If you're going to be losing a fair proportion of your revenue due to your site being down then it makes sense to pay more for hosting backed with an SLA or even just very responsive support!

After all you spend more on toilet roll for your office than £2.50 per month so why should you skimp on your hosting which is ensuring your main (or only) source of revenue is available to your customers.

 

[4dhosting]

I forgot to also mention that hosting companies also have to pay office rental, staff costs, electricity, phone bills, rackspace, rack power, bandwidth, redundant routers/switches, Cisco SMARTNET (or Eqiv), etc, etc.

There are a lot of indirect costs associated with a reputable provider besides the 'server'.

 

[Coding Monkey]

Excellent post, David.

You're on a business forum, Reakt, with the majority of people offering a service. If 1 person cannot get onto your website, you can literally lose thousands of pounds of income, all because of investing a supposed £20-£30/y on a "good" hosting company. You only need to look at the number of people on here complaining about 1and1 to know of the impact of thousands of customers on servers.

 

[Scott-Copywriter]

Excellent post, David.

You're on a business forum, Reakt, with the majority of people offering a service. If 1 person cannot get onto your website, you can literally lose thousands of pounds of income, all because of investing a supposed £20-£30/y on a "good" hosting company. You only need to look at the number of people on here complaining about 1and1 to know of the impact of thousands of customers on servers.

You're missing my point, I'm refering to euphrosene's situation. I may be mistaken but she wont lose thousands of pounds because one person not being able to visit. Although it can happen, it's VERY unlikely and not worth using large chunks of profit long-term 'just incase', in my opinion. If it was a large corporation or a business selling very expensive professional services, then it may be worth it.

And my other point, it isnt as bad as you think. My webhost provider has a claim for 99.9% uptime and that has been proven true since I started using their service over two years ago, not a single spot of downtime, and if we do have any downtime we get the next month free. I think people have a misconception of budget webhosts, some are bad but the majority are not as bad as people think.

 

[spidersites]

I user www.bluehost.com. Be supprised if anyone in the uk could beat this for value.

 

[4dhosting]

You're missing my point, I'm refering to euphrosene's situation. I may be mistaken but she wont lose thousands of pounds because one person not being able to visit. Although it can happen, it's VERY unlikely and not worth using large chunks of profit long-term 'just incase', in my opinion. If it was a large corporation or a business selling very expensive professional services, then it may be worth it.

This is basically what I was getting at - You need to consider how much money you'll lose (or how much hassle it'll cause you because hassle/time = money as well) by the site being down and adjust your budget accordingly.

If the site is a basic hobby site or just a simple placeholder that doesn't generate much traffic and isn't a major source of revenue for the business then feel free to use a cheaper package.

I was only getting at the following point really which ring true for a lot of business/customers and they are basically down to misconceptions of the Internet being 'free' (Not helped by TalkTalk, et all):

1) If you're going to host a high revenue site or site you can't stand to be offline on a cheap package then don't moan when it goes down or you can't get hold of support. Also always make sure you have up to date backups, just because the host takes backups doesn't mean you'll be able to get hold of those backups if their support is unavailable (Also many budget hosting packages don't provide guarantees on those backup being taken/verfied as complete/etc as this is a 'premium' service).