My client has a 28 page brochure site and are being charged £150 per month for webste hosting. In the next couple of month they are launching an ecommerce aspect to the site which could potentially sell up to approx 400 lines. Can anybody tell me what they should be reasonably paying for hosting at the moment, what they can expect to pay once the ecommerce shop is running. Also what specifications should we be loking for from our ISP.
Do you have an ecommerce system in mind or are you building your own? I have used Miva Merchant in the past and it can be great if you deal with a hosting company that is a strong supporter of Miva as there are many hosts that have it included in cheap hosting packages and they don't really understand it or update the engine. There are a number of factors involved in pricing but you should get some decent hosting for what they are already paying.
Thanks for that - question is are they over paying at the moment. £150 per month seems excessive I pay less than that per year. What are they getting for this money - I provide them with the web analytics.
I comfortably had a turn over of a few grand a day on a catalogue with up to a thousand products running on £29.95 a month hosting. No need to pay £150. Unless you have loads of traffic and host product video's etc. eating bandwidth, or you have special SSL needs etc. (for instance when you do your own card processing). That cheap host didn't give me support I needed so now I pay more than that £150 but I also have 10 times more traffic etc. now.
Yeah, I would think that if they are willing to pay what they are paying right now, getting a dedicated server would not be a bad idea. This way, you can control and ensure the privacy of the data on the server. I just don't like the idea of sharing the server with someone else especially when there are confidential information involved.
Thanks for al the feedback. What sort of things should I be looking for in a hosting package for a typical ecommerce site? What sort of support would you want.
Haha, I don't get what hosting company he uses. Show me link. For that amount look what server you can get from profithost http://www.profithost.net/store/index.php?act=viewProd&productId=3
As they already have a site,go and take a look at exactly what resources are currently being used. Look at Bandwidth and disk usage, also look at what other features are required - including email, database, own IP (required if SSL) etc. Then, you should look for hosting that provides 4x what you are using now, with other plans that allow for upgrading. Depending on the traffic, you should be able to get very good shared hosting for less than $20/mth.
Feel like a regular expert now- I thnk we are going to go for a dedicated server. Rackspace are quoting £250 for 100Gb of bandwidth but I am guessing there are less expensive providers out there. What are you thoughts.?
Well the price changes , on what you are going to do. 1-Where are you wanting to host (America - Europe) 2-What are you going to host (do you need high connection) 3-How many visitors do you have (Choosing VPS(Virtual Private Server) Dedicated , Semi Dedicated , Resller Hosting) You can find from 50$ to 999$ range of dedicated servers...
I want to host in Europe. We have a new ecommerce site which if we are to reach our targets will need to attract about 20k visits per month. Eventually we will be processing our own payments so SSL will be needed. We will be storing lots of personal data potentially so security is a consideration. And of course performance. The site could potentially have a lot of images so pages could be reasonably large. I think we definietly want t go for a dedicated server.
I cant see why you would ever set a limit on how much you would pay to host a site. Once a site gets big enough it needs it's own server. That's pretty tough to find for $10 a month. Then, it grows even more, and needs another server, or a cluster of servers and a dedicated database server. When a site gets big enough, with a lot of traffic hosting costs go up considerably. Look at digitalpoint here. They just spend about $90,000 on a cluster of servers. The cost shouldn't be the important factor. It should be whether the cost that you pay is justified for your needs and the quality of the setup.
There are definitely lower cost setups out there, but rackspace is very good. Currently we are using 800hosting, and they ended up being about 1/3 the cost of rackspace for a comparable setup. They are US based, but I'm sure that you can find a comparable company in Europe, if you want something a bit cheaper than rackspace. Our current server, which we've had for about a year and a half. Dual 3Ghz Xeon 2Gb RAM RAID 1/0 - 500Gb hard drive Dedicated 100Mbps connection Unlimited Bandwidth (connection limited) Currently have 32 Ip's Managed Firewall 24/7 phone support Costs about $175 / month. Not sure what £ that would translate to. It would have absolutely no problem with 20K visitors per month as long as each user doesn't require some ridiculous bandwidth or database usage.
Jestep - thanks for the advice I have just checked out 800hosting - I like their prices. With 24/7 support I a wonderin whether there are any advantages with hosting in Europe. Are there some performance advantages going for Europe?