How much traffic before web hosting gets "expensive"?

by 14 replies
17
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?
#main internet marketing discussion forum #expensive #hosting #traffic #web
  • 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
  • LOL you got me there for sec

  • 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.
  • 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).
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
    • [2] replies
    • 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. :-)
    • 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.
      • [1] reply
  • 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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