Is running a website that costly??

[Kroze]

I constantly hear that people say they need so much ads and money to maintain a website. Does it cost a lot? I see ads for $5 monthly hosting everywhere which include domain names. I don't see it being that costly since it is only $5/m or am I missing something here.

 

[Vdubchaos]

Depends if you count your time. Time = money

 

[IndyColtsFan]

I constantly hear that people say they need so much ads and money to maintain a website. Does it cost a lot? I see ads for $5 monthly hosting everywhere which include domain names. I don't see it being that costly since it is only $5/m or am I missing something here.

Those people are probably paying web admins/designers/developers to maintain the site and add new functionality. They may also be paying bandwidth charges for any overages (some plans limit your bandwidth).

 

[Charles Kozierok]

Depends on the site. You're not going to run a website of any significance for $5/month.

 

[Imp]

My cheapass Blogger site is $12/year for the domain name. Google servers host for me.

Using a hosting service is more expensive (not by much if you use the cheapest option), but I figured out that I didn't need it with so little traffic.

Add the time and money to do it, or getting someone else to do it, then yes, expensive.

 

[nickbits]

Hosting is only one component of a web site's cost and you aren't going to have much traffic on a $5/month hosting plan

Full time web devs can make over 100k/yr. Then there is the cost to develop content.

 

[drebo]

Depends. If you run a website with any sort of volume of traffic at all, the $5/mo shared hosting packages aren't going to be sufficient. You'll need one or more dedicated server. Plus you'll have bandwidth costs. Plus your own time, plus dev time, plus moderation, content providers, etc, etc.

Running a commercial or high volume website can get very expensive.

 

[z9.ender]

My host is about ~$70/month, with about $10/year for the domain. It's fairly low traffic.

 

[Kroze]

I see fat cow advertise $5 month unlimited space and domain name is included. Is it a scam?

 

[xanis]

I see fat cow advertise $5 month unlimited space and domain name is included. Is it a scam?

Nope, FatCow is very legit (I used to use them, and a friend of mine has something like 10 sites hosted with them). The only thing to be aware of is that the price per month goes up a bit after the promotion is over (see here).

 

[drebo]

I see fat cow advertise $5 month unlimited space and domain name is included. Is it a scam?

Probably legit...but you have to remember that there are probably 1000+ other websites on that same server. Which means performance is going to suck if it's at all compute heavy.

 

[DaveSimmons]

I see fat cow advertise $5 month unlimited space and domain name is included. Is it a scam?

In general, for offers like that: Yes.

The fine print and acceptable use policy will add one set of limits, the number of other sites sharing the server will add another set of limits, and there are probably a third set of limits on what kind of programming and applications will run.

For example, you might not be allowed to run forums. Your MySQL database may be crippled in size or number of connections. You might not have the rights needed to install some applications or packages / libraries. The CPU runtime and memory use limits for your site might break some script code.

Your server will be running 1,000+ other websites besides yours, so pages may serve up very slowly.

 

[xanis]

To answer the OP's question: It really depends on what kind of site you have. Running personal website or blog isn't going to be expensive at all if you do it yourself. However, running a SaaS application that gets a million hits per month probably will be expensive. Like someone else said, it also depends on how much you're doing yourself, and if you count your own time as an expense. If you're employing a designer and developer on a regular basis, for example, then your costs will be significantly higher than Joe Shmoe who's running a templated WordPress instance off some $5/month hosting.

The real costs come when you're running an enterprise-level app or ecommerce site. Creating custom ecommerce sites can get you to six figures in design and development costs alone. Then you also have things like SSL certificates that add to the cost. Basically, if you're running a big site with a lot of traffic and you need a lot of control over the backend, you're going to pay for it. Trying to get by with cheap hosting isn't worth the time or hassle in the long run; you want to pay for quality up-front.

 

[yllus]

You can run a website that gets an incredible amount of traffic for under $250/year.

However, if you want to do anything with that website that involves functionality or design that's anything better than average, you're talking about paying serious money to developers, designers and maybe server administrators for really esoteric stuff. A good developer is somewhere between $60 and $100 an hour so your costs go up in a hurry.

Oh, and I assume you'll have to pay yourself or some staff to actually create content for the site, or moderate it if it's socially contributed to.

 

[Absolution75]

All of the really cheap hosting is for people with extremely low traffic sites. Even though they are "unlimited", there are actually a lot of limitations. If you add too much load to the server, you'll get kicked off. I ran a simple vbulletin forum with fairly low traffic (~20 members browsing at one time) and I got kicked off a shared hosting plan.

I pay $100/mo for colocation which isn't terrible; it has unmetered 100mbps bandwidth.

 

[M0oG0oGaiPan]

Depends on the site and what you plan on doing with it.

For example, you can go with a cheap host and run a cms like wordpress. Your primary costs would be hosting, domain, time to create original content (or spin content).

Usually for those unlimited space deals oversell or load up a lot of people on the server. They're counting on most people not ever realy utilizing their space and some places will limit your processes. I think hostgator does this.

Costs can add up if you outsource web development, content (articles, graphics, etc). Plugins/themes if you go with a CMS. ecommerce packages. Marketing.

Also if you make money from your site through adsense/affiliates you will also have to file as a business and pay taxes on your comissions. So you may want to pay for an accountant.

 

[ViviTheMage]

It depends on what type of website you are running, and how much cpu/memory you are consuming. If it's little/none, then those shard, $5 should work fine.

If it's actually consuming, you'll get kicked off, and you'll need to spin up your own VPS, or Dedicated server(s) to do it properly.

We have some clients that run multiple servers for one vbulletin forum...power hungry sites, especially when queries are run.

 

[KentState]

We had about $10 million in salaries to "run" the internet site at my last job. Of course, we made roughly $140 million in revenue. Hosting costs at our colo was $15k/month, Akamai was another $15k, then there was licensing and a lot of hardware/software costs.

 

[OverVolt]

You can run a website that gets an incredible amount of traffic for under $250/year.

However, if you want to do anything with that website that involves functionality or design that's anything better than average, you're talking about paying serious money to developers, designers and maybe server administrators for really esoteric stuff. A good developer is somewhere between $60 and $100 an hour so your costs go up in a hurry.

Oh, and I assume you'll have to pay yourself or some staff to actually create content for the site, or moderate it if it's socially contributed to.

What about something like the drudge report? Its basically a home page with links. Its madness how much he makes vs how little content he contributes.

 

[Red Squirrel]

You need some money for hosting and stuff but we're not talking anything ridiculous. You can do the rest yourself, why pay somebody. Heck if you don't want to learn to code you can even use *puke* Frontpage or something or premade CMSes. It amazes me that some companies will somehow manage to spend thousands of dollars on a simple website. Somebody, somewhere, is getting ultra rich. The hospital I used to work at paid something insane like 30 grand for their Intranet! I could not believe it. I would have charged them maybe 500 bucks for it at very most. It was basically just a CMS with a template thrown on top. Was up to the departments to add their own pages etc.

 

[ViviTheMage]

What about something like the drudge report? Its basically a home page with links. Its madness how much he makes vs how little content he contributes.

It would probably take a little to run, but they probably have some sort of content delivery network throughout the world, like akamai...which costs.

 

[nageov3t]

depends on what you're doing.

I work for a web hosting company... we've got some clients who are getting charged thousands of dollars per month for their hosting/support needs (throw in ssd drives, san storage, hourly backups with off-site replication, etc)

 

[Texashiker]

I constantly hear that people say they need so much ads and money to maintain a website. Does it cost a lot? I see ads for $5 monthly hosting everywhere which include domain names. I don't see it being that costly since it is only $5/m or am I missing something here.

A lot of it has to do with how much traffic your site gets and how fast you want the pages to load. Is it a static site, or a database driven site?

A basic html site is not going to take many resources. Install wordpress, joomla, vbulletin,,, then you add a database server and disk access time.

My hosting bill is $100 a month.

But then again, my pages do not take 10+ seconds to load either.

 

[TechBoyJK]

We used to host Woot.com before they were acquired by Amazon.

During a wootOff, they'd sometimes use up to 700Mbps bandwidth. They'd have to tell us when they were doing wootOff's so we didn't mistake the spike as an incoming dDos attack.

Even at $10 per 1Mbps, which is good pricing for a multi-homed, backbone peered bgp uplink, they were spending at least $5,000 a month JUST for bandwidth. (700Mbps x $10 is $7k) Not to mention several racks of servers, and each rack had (4) 20a/120v circuits. ($300 per month each circuit). All in all I think they paid about $15,000 per month for hosting.

How much did they pay their admins? They had quite a few people working on managing the site and the infrastructure. I'm guessing at least 5 people so that's probably $25,000 a month there.

I'd wager woot.com cost at least $50,000 a month for them to operate.

 

[zCypher]

We used to host Woot.com before they were acquired by Amazon.

During a wootOff, they'd sometimes use up to 700Mbps bandwidth. They'd have to tell us when they were doing wootOff's so we didn't mistake the spike as an incoming dDos attack.

Even at $10 per 1Mbps, which is good pricing for a multi-homed, backbone peered bgp uplink, they were spending at least $5,000 a month JUST for bandwidth. (700Mbps x $10 is $7k) Not to mention several racks of servers, and each rack had (4) 20a/120v circuits. ($300 per month each circuit). All in all I think they paid about $15,000 per month for hosting.

How much did they pay their admins? They had quite a few people working on managing the site and the infrastructure. I'm guessing at least 5 people so that's probably $25,000 a month there.

I'd wager woot.com cost at least $50,000 a month for them to operate.

^^ exactly. If you're just hosting a website for your personal needs, those $3-5/mo hosting plans will do you just fine. I had one for a while and never had any problems, but I also hardly had any traffic. If you're running anything of significant content and volume, what TechBoyJK and the others have said applies perfectly. You don't want to cheap out on your hosting if you want to reliably and consistently deliver significant volume to visitors.

I'd say get the hosting solution that fits your needs into the foreseeable future. If your traffic goes up, you can re-evaluate your hosting needs. While you don't want to cheap out, you also don't want to over-spend for negligible traffic needs.