Take a site like HuffingtonPost.com. With over 19,000,000 hits per day, what would you estimate their average monthly server costs?
Such huge sites mostly use multiple servers. The load is balanced across multiple web servers with different Mysql servers clustered together. It is hard to estimate their server costs.
As mentioned above, a busy website like that is likely to be hosted on multiple servers with the web servers load balanced and the DB servers either in a cluster or mirrored setup
I bet their monthly servers cost is low, but they do pay high $$ to deliver their content to users. They use CDN, and the expensive one, Akamai So, most probably, they have couple of web servers, would not be surprised if they dont have database cluster, but single DB server. www.huffingtonpost.com IP Address : 72.247.219.11 Reverse DNS : a72-247-219-11.deploy.akamaitechnologies.com Traffic /month : at least - 17.28 TB Web Server : Apache/2.2.8 (Unix) Hosting ISP : Akamai Technologies Latitude : 42.362595 Longitude : -71.0843 Location : Cambridge Massachusetts 02142 UNITED STATES
If they use CDNs (Content Delivery Networks), they pay a cost based on each GB they use. You can actually call CDN companies to get a quote. Other than that, server costs depends on what types of pages they are serving, whether they are dynamic or static, how much caching they are using, how optimized their code is. You can't guess a cost purely on hits.
wow, really? did you figure it by your self or by reading other posts in this thread? or you just like to post for the sake of it?
Bandwidth is going to be the primary expense. How much? Well, how long is a piece of string. Its anyone's guess. I can tell you this though. Its more than the $10 per year, all you can eat some people expect over here.
Traffic is not a good indicator of how much it costs to run a site. 1 visit to You Tube likely consumes 100x the bandwidth that 1 visit to site without video. So it is really difficult to guess costs off of such metrics. Also, some applications may have very high resource requirements, meaning more servers, etc. All of these items influence costs. Some of the primary hosting costs drivers are: Bandwidth - Often a significant direct cost for busy sites. I have some clients that see over 30 million page views a month. Their bandwidth costs are 60% of the total expense. Hardware - This is actually a lot cheaper than people realize. If they are using commodity hardware, you can get costs down pretty low, but some big sites like to deploy big-iron. Certain SAN, load balancers, and routers can cost $100,000's. Redundancy - If you are globally load balanced it can get expensive as you need redundant networking gear and server space in a variety of locations. Your disaster recovery plans also add to the costs. Staffing - This is can also be a large expense. In clusters I manage, the management expenses are often as much as or more than the hardware. Monitoring and maintaining clustered systems can be time-consuming. Also, a common misconception is that costs are linear as you start to build out a cluster. This is typically not the case. The cost to run a 2 server cluster is often 3-5x more expensive than running a single server. A 10 server cluster may be 10-20x more expensive than a 2 server cluster. Once you start adding more units, the complexity increases, requiring more knowledgeable staff, specialized hardware and management resources.
From looking at the site, it is going to be the bandwidth that costs the most, they will be running it across multiple servers
You should consider the monthly bandwidth transfer, Net speed, server configuration like RAM, memory and more