Is the cost for web hosting low or what?
I’m preparing to switch web host providers and astounded at the low cost of hosting. When I joined the Board of an organization last summer I noticed that they were spending $100 a month for web hosting. If you look at today’s market rates, $100 is about 5 times more than we should be paying.
Such offers from Dreamhost.com and Omnis.com make it so that you can have a website up an running for under $150 a year (n/i domain registration, of course). How have prices fallen so far for bundled host services? My guess is that as processing power increases while the cost of technology decreases, it’s easier to cram multiple domains on one web server without losing reponse and service time.
I thought I was going to get screwed with the obligatory multi-year contract and early cancellation fees but everything has been waived, including set up fees. Is it too good to be true?
Anyway, wondering if the techies want to ring in with their thoughts on the matter…
Sam
barnson.org hosting
barnson.org is hosted on a “VDS”, or “Virtual Dedicated Server”. It’s a FreeBSD box with 2 GB of RAM and a few hundred megabytes of disk space on IDE disks. I bought 40GB/month of transfer, 3 GB of disk space, root access to my virtual server, and the ability to run all my own services for just $28/month. All on an exceptionally fast connection. The provider runs 10-16 virtual dedicated servers per physical machine.
jvds.com is my hosting provider. And I’ve noticed that he is lowering his prices, and giving more.
Not to mention providers like Server Beach, EV1Servers.net (formerly rackshack.net), and other $99/month basic hosting providers. They’ll lease you a dedicated server that you manage, give you several dozen gigabytes of disk space, half a gig of RAM, and hundreds of gigabytes of transfer per month for a really low price.
I’ve been amazed and pleased with the changes. If you run a low-traffic site like this one, nothing beats the dirt-cheap cost of hosting today.
Let me know if/when you get your server up and running? I’d love to link to it from here. And now that I’m back from vacation, I plan on getting that fan site for your band up and running 🙂
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Matthew P. Barnson
web hosting
If you take Matt’s $28/month x 12, that’s $336 a year. 10 web sites is $3360, which more than paid for that machine. Now, if he’s giving T1 (192 Kb/s) speeds, that’s $800 a month. T3 speeds (~10 Mb/s) could run $5000 a month (I’m not quite as sure on a T3). And then you go to fiber optic.
If you have everyone like Matt running their own sites, all you need to do it regular maintenance. If you want it professional and up all the time, then you need to get into clustered machines and redundant connections. But you can buy machines configured for that, and it’s 99% start-up costs, then wait and collect your money. The more sites you host, provided you have the resources, the more money you make.
There’s a LOT of people/businesses who pay too much for IT services. DNS is such a beast. A DNS server is almost all up-front cost, and once you get it configured, you hardly ever change it. But ISPs charge businesses $20-30 a month for having it. I can modify my DNS settings in 5 minutes. That’s akin to the mechanic sharging 3 standard hours for a 15-minute repair.
But the joy of being computer literate is that we know how to do it, and they pay us for that knowledge. Like car repairs, it’s not hard to do once you know how, but sometimes it’s just easier to pay to have it done than learning it yourself.
As always, Weed
$28/month
JVDS actually targets 16 customers per machine, making it that much more lucrative. And for each new machine, after the first 3-4 weeks while everybody’s going crazy building stuff, performance stays pretty darn sharp.
Makes me think I ought to go into business doing what JVDS does. While I wouldn’t exactly make a mint, if I could get just a hundred customers, it would support my family and me nicely.
The trick, of course, is making money on fairly thin margins, and figuring out how to get the up-front money to purchase the machines, co-locate them, etc. We have about $4,000 in the bank, but it’s a choice between funding a business or feeding my family through February… Argh.
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Matthew P. Barnson