Hosting Costs...

Hey guys. I've been working in the avs industry for a few years now and think it's time for me to do something different.

I think i have a pretty good grasp of what i need to know to start my own pay-site but i'm kindda in the dark about some aspects of the business.

One of my main concerns is hosting...and primarily the cost of hosting.

The pay-site i'm wanting to put up will have both pictures and videos...very LARGE videos. I'm not too concerned about the hosting costs of the pictures, as it'll be insignificant in comparison to the hosting costs of the videos.

I've looked at some pay-sites and their respective hosting providers in an attempt to get an idea as to how much hosting for a photo/video site of this sort might cost. what i've realized is that it costs a lot. Lol Much more than I thought.

So my question is…does anyone know how much a site like SeanCody.com would be paying for hosting per month?

I’m using SeanCody.com as an example because that’s the most I think I’ll EVER have to pay for hosting and if I know how much that maximum is I’ll know where I stand on the bigger scheme of things.

I’ve used some rough calculations to came up with an approximation of maybe around $15,000 a month. Is that reasonable? Could he be paying more than that per month in hosting costs?

PS. Why does his hosting company (http://www.cwie.net) charge over 6X for approximately the same amount of BW as does my current hosting provider http://www.protgp.com?

Any other cautions/advice when it comes to hosting?
Why would i want to co-locate?
What are all these talks about setting up offshore?

Thanks a lot guys and sorry for the essay :D

AlE.

Hey get in touch with ICQ: 4930562

I'll explain every single question in full detail, too much to write here.

SnowBoy, I can set you up on a great hosting plan that will not cost you a bomb and we would be able to grow as your site grows too. At the beginning your hosting costs will be minimal until you start growing your membership and content base, but then as you grow your income grows and we would expand your hosting at the same time. For example, one client started out with a small video site on a dedicated server and now he is leasing 3 dedicated servers and is growing by 20-30 members a day, burning through about 2 terragigs a month in bandwidth...but that is OK since he can easily afford it now with the income from his membership base.

If you want more details or want to work something out, just drop me an email sales@chilihost.com or ICQ 118860760. Looking forward to chatting.

Cheers,

Luke

There are many great choices here. Take the time to shop a bit and be sure to check out SinHost http://www.sinhost.com

You can email us at sales@sinhost.com or icq brad at 56-950-199.

Thanks

Here's my 2 cents as both an adult webmaster and a hosting provider.

Hosting is one of those things where it's really hard to know exactly what you're getting.

One of the main issues, from my perspective, is who is actually hosting your site. There are a *lot* of hosting companies out there who are, in reality, reselling somebody else's hosting.

Many resellers quote exceptionally cheap pricing, because they're grossly overselling their bandwidth For example, they may have a server that can deliver 1000 gigs/month, but be offering each of the 200 customers on the box 500 gigs, knowing they won't all use it... and, to make matters worse, whomever they are reselling may be grossly overselling as well.

The other big problem with resellers is that they don't usually have control over their equipment and if there's a problem, you're at the mercy of somebody who has to contact somebody else... so it can take a lot of time and hassle to get issues resolved. Not to say that resellers are all bad, you just have to be careful.

At the opposite end are providers like Level 3, who have their own data centers, their own backbone, and their own infrastructure. You'll generally get very reliable service, but you'll usually pay top dollar, because they have to support all of the cost of the data center, the people to staff it, tier-1 bandwidth, etc.

In the middle are hosting companies that lease racks of space in somebody else's data center. If you know and/or trust who you're buying from, this can often be an excellent value, because there's currently a glut of bandwidth and server space out there, so these smaller guys, if they have good technical personnel and business smarts, can make use of the deals that are out there and pass on good value to their customers.

Our company, for example, has servers that we own located in 4 different, geographically diverse data centers. This ensures that if one upstream provider flakes, gets attacked, has network problems, or other issues, we can easily move traffic across to one of our other data centers.

As for bandwidth, prices are all over the map... a company that locked pricing in a year or more ago will be stuck with bandwidth that's anywhere from $2-5 per gig, while companies buying in quantity on the current market can get good bandwidth for 30 to 50 cents per gig. Of course, you typically won't find tier 1 providers for that price, but we have a mix of both, and find that, for the most part, our economy bandwidth is just as reliable and almost as fast as our tier-1 bandwidth.

In short, if you look around, you can find great deals. But definitely consider service in the mix. My hosting company isn't inexpensive, because we focus on fanatic service, and our customers are happy to pay for it. If you're technically adept and can administer your own box, you'll be able to find some excellent values... but if you want to focus on your site, and not the backend technical stuff, I'd recommend paying extra to get the high-quality service and ability to reach a real person at 3am on Sunday when your site is down.

(EDIT:) In re-reading, I realized I never actually answered the question.

The main thing that determines price is bandwidth. A site with up to 300 members and a lot of streaming video content might expect to pay $300-1000 per month (this based on a wild guess of 2000 gigs/bandwidth/month, and assuming aggressive bandwidth pricing.) A site with up to 300 members and maybe 2 hours of video and a bunch of stills might pay $150-500/month. You can do the math for larger sites.

Hope that helps!