Creating a website that may have high amounts of traffic..

Mr Spew · 5 Dec 2008 at 14:14

Hey there..

I've had a couple of ideas of making a website (or two, or three..), but wondered what you'd estimate the initial cost and running costs down the line to be, as I've really no clue.

The creation of a professional looking website with all the infrastructure there, the bandwidth (if it's popular with 40,000 active members on the site logging in every week or so) cost and other things that you may feel need mentioning.. what sort of cost would be involved?

Thanks in advance!

GravyMonster · 5 Dec 2008 at 14:26

Waaaaay more info needed

What is the site doing?
Is 40,000 the number of users you currently have or are you starting from scratch?
Would you be building it yourself?
What kind of hosting are you after? Dedicated/shared? ASP/PHP/.NET? MSSQL/MySQL?

We'll try those for starters, work with me here

intellix · 5 Dec 2008 at 15:04

Well if you use maths to put together information such as:

How large will each page be? How many pages will the users display on average visiting your website? Add images etc sooo you could get an average per user of the download they would use then * by 40,000

I think the costs are fairly small and as Spunkey says... where will 40k users come from?

I get about 3 users a month to my sites lol

so I just use free hosting as i've not made anything major yet

Domain names cost about: £10 for two years for a .co.uk or about £25-30 for a .com for 2 years (I think)

General hosting can range from about £5 - £80 a month... depending on what you need, want such as scripting support, bandwidth/month, space etc etc. One company im looking at now: charges £5/month for 250mb space, 2gb bandwidth(no scripting support). or for £8 you get PHP support, 500mb space, 5GB bandwidth... I've usually found that freehosts serve my purpose so far

Mr Spew · 5 Dec 2008 at 15:05

Heh, sorry for the vagueness! Advertising (for free, but funded by ads/Google) personal sales (this is an example as I want to keep the idea private the moment, heh) online where people can offer and send messages and all that.

Starting from scratch, getting others to do the meat of the work - I've no idea about the hosting, I guess that's also why I'm here to ask what's best!

Cheers!

Mr Spew · 5 Dec 2008 at 15:05

intellix said:
Well if you use maths to put together information such as:

How large will each page be? How many pages will the users display on average visiting your website? Add images etc sooo you could get an average per user of the download they would use then * by 40,000

I think the costs are fairly small and as Spunkey says... where will 40k users come from? I get about 3 users a month to my sites lol so I just use free hosting as i've not made anything major yet

The number is an estimation from other websites doing the same thing and the figure I'd like to hit.. rather build to that than to too little.. I guess!

GravyMonster · 5 Dec 2008 at 16:38

If 40k hits a week is a speculative figure I'd say you'd be lucky to hit that after a couple of years.

So with that in mind I'd suggest you start off with a pretty standard hosting package. TSO Host will sort you out on that front for about £50 a month.

Without more info on the site itself (but assuming it's something along the idea of the Friday Ads) it wouldn't be too complex a build. If you're looking to get an agency to do it for you I'd expect around a £3-4k budget depending on complexity and scalability.

Mr Spew · 5 Dec 2008 at 18:27

Something I should have mentioned - it'd ideally be a membership basis, so people sign up and can search through other people's profiles to find what's best for them, then it's a case of setting automated e-mailing. I have a feeling it could work well.. I mean, I need to check how much it costs to put it higher up on the Google results..

fishfishfish · 6 Dec 2008 at 19:18

Traffic levels like that won't come about overnight, or without some very effective marketing and SEO, so I don't think you need to worry too much about costs from the start. You're probably going to struggle to get traffic initially.

As stated above, it totally depends on what the site is doing, how it's built and what content you're serving. If you think you're going to get heavy constant traffic, or significant spikes (from newsletters or the Digg/Slashdot effect) you really need to plan for it in advance when the site is being developed.

You definitely ought to consider caching stuff, limiting SQL queries to the least possible and optimising everything so it uses the least amount of server resources. You also ought to consider putting the database/video on other servers, as it can be difficult to balance the load if you only have a single machine that's getting hammered. You'll probably also need a dedicated or colo server once traffic levels get near those levels.

The main site I look after now has around 275,000 unique users a month. That site has grown from cheap shared virtual server-based hosting to a colo machine costing several grand a year. That's been fine for a year or two, but traffic spikes are now taking the site down. We've now outgrown that and are moving to a blade server with load balancing - the chargeback on that is a five figure sum. So if/when you get to the 40K active members level you're going to be looking at some hefty bills - we've only got 10K active out of 75K registered.

40K active members is pretty flipping massive to be honest! You'd be sitting on a potential goldmine if you can get traffic levels up that high.