How much traffic before web hosting gets "expensive"?

14 replies
OK so I'm migrating from wordpress.com to a self-hosted site, and I'm wondering, how much traffic do I need to have before this starts getting ridiculously expensive?
#expensive #hosting #traffic #web
  • Profile picture of the author Fadiz
    hosting is still pretty cheap even if you have thousands of page views daily, if you worried about scaling get mediatemple grid with MySQL GridContainer your cost will be 40$ per month and you can upgrade it with a click
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  • Profile picture of the author Fadiz
    LOL you got me there for sec

    Originally Posted by komplex View Post

    Each visitor costs $1 each, so if you have 1,000 people visit your website, you'll need $1000 for that month just to cover server costs..




    Just kidding, $20/Month with mediatemple should cover it.
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  • Profile picture of the author tjggs
    This truly depends on the amount of traffic, the types of plugins that you have and what technology you're hosting on (not the brand of hosting). A lot of times, people make that mistake. Now obviously some companies manage servers better than others, so that has some weight.

    I would start off with a shared server (if you've got moderate traffic), if you know you've got a lot of traffic, start with a VPS, or more traffic, a dedicated server... even more traffic? Try putting nginx and seperate mysql off onto its own server -- there are a lot of options.

    Bottom line is, if you're not making money at the end of the day, re-think your business model or optimize.
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  • Profile picture of the author James.N
    If you eventually get enough traffic that you outgrow your hosting, that's a great thing. Once you max out your shared hosting you can move to a VPS which is scalable, then if you ever need to you can move to a dedicated server.

    A VPS will run your about $40/month but if you're getting that much traffic you should easily be making at least that from your website(s).
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  • Profile picture of the author kieranlavelle
    just think of it this way, A LOT

    If each user was doing 100kb a page (in reality far less) and you have 100gb bandwidth that's 1000000 page loads in reality there probably using 25kb per page.
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  • Profile picture of the author Haste
    All based on what you want to do! our hosting is a lot higher, but the flexibility we have is insane - we have hosting in multiple states and three countries... this helps a lot with some of the work we do! basic hosting is SO cheap and bandwidth is nearly free - I used site5.com for awhile in the past and they were cheap and provided a solid system.
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  • Profile picture of the author Kingfish85
    In all honesty, it depends on what kind of solution you're looking for as well as require. If your site only needs basic shared hosting, then the price can be cheap.

    When you start adding in complex requirements, resources, security, optimization, backups management etc, it starts to add up.

    Even though it's not on our website, we do a lot of high end, custom configurations for local businesses here that are pretty expensive. When you business hinges on performance & reliability, choose carefully which "mickey mouse" company you choose.

    The average website does not require very much. High volume, complex web applications do on the other hand.
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  • Profile picture of the author talfighel
    There is no one company out there that will raise your price because you have lots of web pages. That is kind of weird to say. The one that I am using now and paying the same for years is called Host4Profit.com. I don't have an affiliate link for you so you would just need to register with them if you want to by looking for them on Google.

    I hope that this helps.
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    • Profile picture of the author AgileWarrior
      If you expect a small traffic for the single domain, you could start off at the low end of the subscription. E.g., HostGator charges as little as $3.96 for a single domain with unlimited disk space and bandwidth. As you get more domains, upgrading to the BABY plan at $6.36/month, and so on.

      As you host more bandwith-sucking materials (pictures, and especially videos), you could push these to youtube/vimeo/etc, or even Amazon's S3. Just be sure to read the TOS, else these free video-hosting sites will delete your videos.

      Test the waters first before jumping with both feet. :-)
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    • Profile picture of the author IMNomad
      Bandwidth is the real cost. Shared hosting with good traffic often gets throttled which reduces page response times. Higher up the food chain, as mentioned is a virtual private server, that you can manage yourself. Requires a lot of learning and is a pain to administer because often you have to load the OS yourself. There are also pre-built options too.

      However, if you really need to push the limits go with a cloud service. Joyent offers a terrabyte (yes terrabyte) of traffic with each node as part of the price. Amazon you pay for incoming and outgoing requests, it sure adds up. A node goes for about $60 bucks/month I think.

      Another option is to use a CDN with your existing setup. A content delivery network, when set up properly it is very powerful in reducing server load. You pay for bandwidth but it is dirt cheap.

      It gets setup with a sub-domain that points to their servers. When a visitor comes to your site, the CDN is automatically checked whether they have a copy of the page that was requested. If not, your server serves the page to the visitor and the CDN pulls that data over to their server. So the next request for that page gets pulled from the CDN. Takes a huge burden off of your server.

      Some cdn's even have a wordpress plugin, maxcdn comes to mind for that one.

      Hope that helps.
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      • Profile picture of the author Eelco de Boer
        One of the best problems to have Gotta love it!
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        • Profile picture of the author newbie1234
          The short answer is, a lot. I'll assume that you will be running a blog type format similar to Wordpress. What most hosting marketers don't want you to realize is that it's rarely the bandwidth/disk space that is a limiting factor for most web sites. You will most likely start to hit problems with CPU/RAM/Disk Speed limitations.

          It seems like most reputable hosting providers do a good job of managing those three factors. It starts to get expensive when you move beyond sharing resources.

          Expensive is relative, but ridiculously expensive IMO starts to happen when you need multiple servers in a cluster/load balanced. For a blog, this is going to be a huge number of monthly visitors. Although the technology and software is rapidly improving, paying qualified people to take care of it is very expensive. And again, this becomes a lot more expensive when you can no longer afford to have a technician 'as needed'. You can see this is true if you take a minute to look at Wikipedia's financials. Yea, they spend a lot on bandwidth, but it's a tiny percentage compared to their technical staff's salary.
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          • Profile picture of the author omgcats
            Based on my personal experience I would say around 1 million pageviews a month.

            With around 800k pvs/month I was having performance issues with FatCow (~$90/year), so I switched to a mediatemple gridserver at $20/month thinking that would fix it. I was way over my allocated resources so I switched to a mediatemple dedicated virtual at $50/month. As my traffic has grown (up to 1.6 million pvs now), I've had to upgrade my DV twice and I'm now paying $150/month. I'm now shopping around for fully managed wordpress hosting so that they'll do all the optimizing for me, and those plans are $150-$250 and up. A few years ago that would have seemed like an absurd amount to pay for hosting, but luckily my revenues have grown with the traffic.

            Unless you run a video hosting site or something like that, you shouldn't have to worry about hosting being a significant expense. Once you get to the point where you need expensive hosting, you should be making enough money to support it. In retrospect I'm really impressed with the amount of traffic that FatCow could handle at such a low price.
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  • Profile picture of the author Kim Roach
    You really should be just fine with shared hosting. Something like Bluehost.com.

    The biggest key - especially if you're hosting a Wordpress site - is that you MUST have a caching plugin. Quick Cache is my personal favorite. This creates a DRAMATIC improvement on your site's speed and allows you to serve up static html plages.
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