How much does this forum cost to host each month?

platypus · 19 Jan 2009 at 09:42

olegs said:
How do they pay for it?

It more then pays for itself.

Abraham · 19 Jan 2009 at 09:42

Tomc@T said:
I think you are right, it must certainly generate more sales than it costs to run/host this website, how many threads do we see daily on the subject of "Spec me this please...."

imho a great piece of marketing by OcUK.

evidently it does or they wouldnt offer benefits to forum members, a growing community on the forums means the people are more likely to use the shop, so these benefits encourage people to become part of the community and give the community more reason than loyalty to use the shop

poopots · 19 Jan 2009 at 09:45

Doran said:
Just out of interest, because it is VERY busy and must cost loads!

A handjob and a leg.

Slime101 · 19 Jan 2009 at 09:53

Its hosted in london docklands, costs a lot too!

meghatronic · 19 Jan 2009 at 09:56

It's really paid for by Hamster breeding programs Spie set up. This is worth millions, so the hosting company do good out of it.

(IIRC the cost is kept private)

gord · 19 Jan 2009 at 09:57

I heard Gilly drives round with it hanging out of his passenger window.. showing it off to the ladies!

misterPK · 19 Jan 2009 at 09:59

willhub said:
Why is OcUK not bigger than 4chan?

Because we have standards here?

PK!

Slime101 · 19 Jan 2009 at 10:01

meghatronic said:
It's really paid for by Hamster breeding programs Spie set up. This is worth millions, so the hosting company do good out of it.

(IIRC the cost is kept private)

Cost probably is kept private, however if you really wanted to know get the company accounts from companies house itll all be in there.

TaKeN · 19 Jan 2009 at 10:01

willhub said:
Why is OcUK not bigger than 4chan?

Because OcUK doesn't allow pedofiles?

mangobreeder · 19 Jan 2009 at 10:19

Tomc@T said:
I think you are right, it must certainly generate more sales than it costs to run/host this website, how many threads do we see daily on the subject of "Spec me this please...."

imho a great piece of marketing by OcUK.

also think of the cost saving, where people post the check before i click threads in general hardware.

they save on returns for stuff people cant use etc.,
and a guy on the end of the phone saves time, by not speaking to the to check compatability.

it also created a sense of loyality, i for one would not shop anywhere else

well apart from the emergency router i needed from the purple shop, there and then.

ubern00b · 19 Jan 2009 at 10:28

Why does UK hosting/bandwidth cost so much? Initially when reading this thread I thought "couple hundred pounds a year" but after some googleing it seems UK based solutions are horrendous prices. I have a server in France on 100mbit unlimited bandwidth and it only costs £42 a month.

Cosimo · 19 Jan 2009 at 10:33

gord said:
I heard Gilly drives round with it hanging out of his passenger window.. showing it off to the ladies!

What a frightening vision.

I’m sure that forum pays for itself many times over.

philjohn · 19 Jan 2009 at 10:36

ubern00b said:
Why does UK hosting/bandwidth cost so much? Initially when reading this thread I thought "couple hundred pounds a year" but after some googleing it seems UK based solutions are horrendous prices. I have a server in France on 100mbit unlimited bandwidth and it only costs £42 a month.

Yes, but there's different qualities of bandwidth and data centre. OcUK will probably be in a decent DC with massive redundancy, multiple high quality peered routes running on multiple enterprise class servers (not the kind you can lease for £42 a month, that's for sure).

You can also bet that if everyone tried to use their bandwidth at once with your supplier it would grind to a halt as it'll be heavily oversold and contended, OcUK probably have guaranteed bw.

Add to that beefy firewalls, load balancers etc and it all adds up very quickly. They probably have a very good SLA too, which you don't.

ubern00b · 19 Jan 2009 at 10:53

Sorry if I took your post in the wrong way, but you sound a little condescending

The DC my server is hosted in has all the features you mentioned, except I'm not running enterprise class servers. The thread title is "How much does this forum cost to host each month?" and even my little C2D 2ghz, 2gb ram, 750gb hdd, 100mbit unlimited, guaranteed bandwidth @ £42 a month would suffice in this regard.

All the kit you are talking about would be for the shop, since if that goes down they get no business. I don't see why you would run load balancers, netscalers etc for a forum

Ice Rich · 19 Jan 2009 at 11:00

Interesting, we've had price estimates from £20 - £100k+!

Abraham · 19 Jan 2009 at 11:02

ubern00b said:
All the kit you are talking about would be for the shop, since if that goes down they get no business. I don't see why you would run load balancers, netscalers etc for a forum

i'm sure they have more failsafes for the shops than the forum, but the forum is a fairly integral part of their business and as such i imagine has plenty of features like that in place

Adz · 19 Jan 2009 at 11:08

ubern00b said:
The DC my server is hosted in has all the features you mentioned, except I'm not running enterprise class servers. The thread title is "How much does this forum cost to host each month?" and even my little C2D 2ghz, 2gb ram, 750gb hdd, 100mbit unlimited, guaranteed bandwidth @ £42 a month would suffice in this regard.

As someone responsible for hosting many websites as large or larger than this, I can assure you that you could not host this forum on a Core2Duo with SATA

. The least you could expect is one very large server with fast SCSI RAID but separating the web and database onto separate machines would be the first logical step. You would then look at replicating the database and load balancing the frontend servers (thus requiring N+1 on the load balancers too).

The cost associated with high end hosting is dictated mostly by the SLA - the penalty the provider has to pay if they screw up. I know Jamie and co provide OcUK with an excellent service and I'm sure OcUK are more than happy to pay good money for it to provide the kind of experience which makes these forums so popular, not to mention keeping the store ticking over.

jas72 · 19 Jan 2009 at 11:33

dunno what teh traffic is like but it's only text so can't be that big. The GD only goes back 45 days or so so it isn't kept that long. I'd say traffic is is MB rather than GB per month.

jas72 · 19 Jan 2009 at 11:35

philjohn said:
Yes, but there's different qualities of bandwidth and data centre. OcUK will probably be in a decent DC with massive redundancy, multiple high quality peered routes running on multiple enterprise class servers (not the kind you can lease for £42 a month, that's for sure).

You can also bet that if everyone tried to use their bandwidth at once with your supplier it would grind to a halt as it'll be heavily oversold and contended, OcUK probably have guaranteed bw.

Add to that beefy firewalls, load balancers etc and it all adds up very quickly. They probably have a very good SLA too, which you don't.

Wonder how much money they got off their bill for the 1 day outage recently.

meghatronic · 19 Jan 2009 at 11:38

jas72 said:
Wonder how much money they got off their bill for the 1 day outage recently.

Probably the full months payment.

jas72 said:
dunno what teh traffic is like but it's only text so can't be that big. The GD only goes back 45 days or so so it isn't kept that long. I'd say traffic is is MB rather than GB per month.

You'd be wrong. ~1000 people online roughly, 150kb per page average, say, they load a page 50 times a day for a month:

150 kb * 1000 * 50 * 30 = 27 gigabytes

I certainly load much more than 50 pages on ocuk a day......