Cost for a heavily visited site?

This may not be the right forum to post this in, but how much does it usually cost to have someone host your site which has around 500,000 visitors a day?

 

Depends on how much bandwidth it uses!!!!!! MP3 site??!!! Oh boy, don't break the bank!!!!

 

Well, what about a site like www.blogshares.com? What if it had 500K visitors a day? How much do u think hosting would cost?

 

You would likely have to worry about processing power far before bandwidth. You would want to get a dedicated server.

 

It would take more than a dedicated to handle 500k a day.. probably a database server and a couple up front. Maybe more, for a blog host of that size.

 

I would say you would and a dedicated database server and more than 1 dedicated web server. Then you need a load balancing setup to distribute traffic between the servers.

Breakdown:
Database Server: $150 / month / server
Each Web Server: $200 / month / server
Load Balancing Setup: $100 / month / switch
Additional Switches and Hardware $1000 / month

For 500K visitors per day, (this is insane) to keep everything running clean, I would look at 10 dedicated servers. 50K visitors per day per server is a rough estimate. I would never exceed 100K per day per server. This is also dependent on the bandwidth usage of each user, and how good of servers you are running. At levels like this you want to lower your bandwidth as much as possible. A 1kb image for 500,000 people is 500Mb of bandwidth. Everything needs to be streamlined to lower the bandwidth.

These are just rough estimates. Someone is also going to have to setup and manage all this, and it is definitely not going to be free.

I would guess about $5000+ to setup and expect about $10000 / month minimum for hosting, support, and bandwidth.

 

How many people here have a website which gets anything close to 500,000 visitors a day?

 

I wish i had such a site

 

I do..<cough, cough> yeh, right.

 

How many sites period get that many visitors. Especially if you are counting unique visitors.

I don't think there are very many out there at all.

 

unless you pay for the traffic

 

Depends on bandwidth usage.
Keep it at 25gigs or less per month, I only charge 12.95 per month.
Beyond that, I usually charge per gig, with a minimum of $2 per month per gig.

Check with your hosting company, what their rates are for bandwidth usage, the plans, etc.

If bandwidth gets too high, with 500,000 visitors per day, I would for sure get either a dedicated server, or get my own server in house.

The Iowa Dawg

 

And what internet connection speed do you suggest he use!!! Dial-up?? Um, no. DSL? Oh no!!!!!

 

I know I'd like to see the Adsense totals from that site

That fast cable! Like 3 megabit? Holy moly!

 

GoDaddy allows 500,000 MB (~488GB) per month transfer and has 50,000MB of storage for only $7 a month. That's what I use for one of my sites. Which is why it's 100% free for visitors to use. I make money through AdSense.

I'd start your site there and then upgrade as needed. Never ever ever start throwing thousands of dollars into operational costs for a new site. You could bankrupt yourself.

Do not spend more per month in operations then you are guarenteed to make a month.

And don't quit your day job.

"That fast cable! Like 3 megabit? Holy moly!"

Depending on your TOS with the cable company you may be required to spend several hundred per month in order to run a server on your home connection.

I use my home server (a 900Mhz PIII) to run web-sites on an alternate port (not port 80 since it's blocked by the ISP) to test them out. If they do well I move them to a real host. In the meantime it costs me zero dollars (I need the internet connection anyway) to run any size site I want to try out new ideas and can make money through AdSense. I'm currently running a wikipedia mirror on it.

As long as your server isn't sucking up all the bandwidth in the neighborhood, cable companies don't care what you do with your connection. Because they know if they raised a fuss, they'd lose business. You just can't run a mail server or run a site on port 80.

 

I'd say that the folks talking about multiple dedicated servers and fairly huge pipes are more in the ballpark of what you're looking at.

Looking at it another way, 500,000 visits,figure they're concentrated in an 8 hour day. Assume say 5 pages per visitor, that's 87 pages per second. In other words, a lot.

Alternatively, at say 30K per page, you're burning 75 gigs a day (assuming 5 pages per visitor). Again, not happening likely on one server on a small connection.

But I think you're overestimating. What you need to be looking at is where you think you're getting 500K uniques daily from. If you have it, you already know the horsepower. If you don't, then the proper answer is - you don't need any amount of hardware because you don't have 500K. And growing into hardware isn't that hard - easy enough that you start with shared, move to managed dedicated, move to colo, move to renting your own rack space - grow into it. Don't sweat it right now.

 

I would be more then happy to host your website for free! That is if you really have a 500,000 daily unique visitor website. PM me if interested. I host many website which are often under DDOS attack, ping attacks, etc. My servers are fully managed for for reliable uptime. Once more, if interested, PM me.

Also, the price depends. Most idiots rent servers and pay $500-$700 monthly for a strong server. I just buy a server for $3,000-$5,000 and manage them myselfs. This will save everyone more time and money. What about the connection? I store my servers in a datacenter near me which I visit frequently. For me its completely free, for others, well it pay cost a little.

EDIT: And I do host 4 websites which make a sum of 600,000 daily unique visitors.

 

If a website is getting 500k unique a day then you more than likely can make enough money from it to cover the costs.

 

i guess jestep has made right guess , my friend has a site which gets 70k uniques a day mp3 wallpappers etc and his total cost for servers/security/bandwidth/hardware is 10,000 USD he has his own private subnet of ips.But he makes way more and easily covers all the costs .

 

"I would be more then happy to host your website for free!"

What's your definition of "free?"

Taking a cut of the profits?

Forcing them to advertise your services?

Neither of those are free.

I'm not sure what the benefit to you is of paying out the nose for the costs of hosting the site while not getting any cut of profits or advertising space.