How much does bandwith cost and how much could they be using

[Blodeuwedd]

Well...it seems to me those pay site owners are lying about "helping pay for bandwith"..... :evil:

[Quorneater]

Mr. Teadrinker uses Godaddy and he's fairly happy with them.

[photo]

i want to know what Pescado has....

[Solander]

Ok,

as i decided to browse your board for some time, i could add my own server stats here. Maybe this is interesting for some of you.

I currently run Pimp my Sims.com with the follow stats:

10,000+ users per day on average, more than 15,000 per day at the weekend
About 40GB traffic per day, more than a terabyte per month
About 200.000 Pageviews per day
Based on Typo3 as Content Management System (quite powerfull, but hungry for CPU, RAM etc.)

This is run on a server with AMD Opteron 175 (Dual-Core), 4.096 MB DDR-RAM and 2 x 250 GB harddrive (Hardware RAID1).

More simple servers simply could not handle the traffic and database queries produced by our visitors and i did upgrade every 3 month since the start of my site.

This server does cost me about 160$ per month.

I considered using some cheaper providers but did not due to the following reasons

• lack of stability (i would like to make sure, my provider is still alive next year)
• Performance: i want users to browse my site as fast and easy as possible
• Features: Hosting packets mostly include very much restrictions on configuration etc
• Bandwidth: The most important point. At least in germany, every single "you get as much bandwidth as you would like to" provider somewhere in his terms of use includes a little "reasonable usage" sentence. This means, if you reach one terabyte, you can bet your house they will kick you.

And yes, i could still run my site at lower costs, if i would distribute downloads to yahoo-groups, free webspace etc. But in fact, i would not be able to check hundreds of files splitted on dozends of webspaces, providers etc. This could simply not be handled at a reasonable effort.

I don't cry about the money i spend, but I do not think that those "5 bucks for heaven on earth" examples posted above fit to every site or the country a website owner lives at. Those costs vary from site to site, so a general "if you pay more than XY, you pay to much" isn't realistic in my opinion.

Solander

[Pescado]

We'll probably break a TB either this month or next month. Our host hasn't even blinked at this. Last month we clocked in about 850 GBs. Malaysian hosting has been good so far.

[Quorneater]

Using normal html pages is less hungry than a database backend.  I am only using the forum model for my site at the moment becuase I am not expecting to be creating masses of stuff.   If I got really busy I would go back to webpages.

Whatever, I decide what I can afford to buy and don't put more stuff up onto it than I can afford.  The few houses I have made went straight up onto MTS2 cos they were big

Anyway Solander, you're a multi-creator site.  They do get expensive to run.   I can't spot if you're a paysite or not, I didn't see any paypal buttons, but in general another way of running a multi-creator site instead of asking for the users to pay, perhaps the creators could each pay their share like they would if it was their own site.

[Solander]

My site is not pay and the other creators are some friends of me, so it's free for them, too. I just wanted to point out that bandwidth and webspace costs vary from country to country so running a high-traffic site in malaysia maybe costs much less than in germany or another country.

[Quorneater]

I am in the UK and I wouldn't dream of having a UK-based web host!!!   Are there site owners who think they had to choose a server local to them?  No wonder it's costing.   US hosting services are many times cheaper than in the UK, and Malaysia might be cheaper, I haven't looked into it.  No wonder people are moaning about the costs if they think they're limited to one country to buy the service from.  :lol:

[Solander]

Oh, i don't think i am limited to germany as source for potential providers. But i would like to get support in german and i feel more "save" if i know, german laws apply to my provider. If some provider in malaysia would kick me, i would have no chance to do anything but searching a new one.

[Quorneater]

I am very lucky with my provider that I seem to have the best of both worlds, but for the purposes of sharing free stuff for a game I wasn't overly concerned with quality and reliability like I would have been if it was the public face of my business that I was relying on for a living.   I keep a copy of my site on my hard disk so if I had to start again it would just be a case of trickling it all up by ftp over several hours.   That's one of the reasons why I am not entirely happy with the forum style for content it's much harder to ressurect after a move.

[Solander]

I feel like Pimp my Sims.com is my public face. If I find any wrong links (e.g. pictures instead of packages in downloads), I feel like standing naked on a market place in front of a large crowd. And I definetely don't like this

Even 30minutes downtime are too much in my eyes. Maybe i'm kind of a perfectionist related to my website. So its my own decision to pay "somewhat" more than I would have to, if I did choose some other provider, but that's ok for me, as long as I can afford it.

[Caedre]

Solander, have you looked at the godaddy site?
I doubt they will be gone next year, since they already exist quite a while.
You can buy additional options if you don't like what they offer, I'm pretty sure its cheaper than what you have atm.

[Pescado]

My site is not pay and the other creators are some friends of me, so it's free for them, too. I just wanted to point out that bandwidth and webspace costs vary from country to country so running a high-traffic site in malaysia maybe costs much less than in germany or another country.

Yes, so what's the benefit of hosting in Germany, then? Move your site to Malaysia instead.

[Solander]

If you can guarantee a 24/7 support with native german speakers and a place of juridication (thats the translation for gerichtsstand) not being in kuala lumpur, i will give it a try  :lol:

[Anouk]

This looks nice, and the owner of hxxp://sims2writershangout.com is very happy about it. She has been there for about a year now.

http://dreamhost.com/hosting.html

200GB storage at signup (+1GB a week)
2 TB (2000GB) a month bandwidth (+16GB a week)
9,95 dollars a month

I wish I had the money to pay for a year. Setup fees for monthly hosting are very high though.