Dear all

I think I may be paying too much for our site hosting and support and wonder if you could offer any advice.

The not-for-profit site receives over 30,000 unique hosts per month. We simply offer information - we are not a commerce site with a secure server.

For hosting and support we're paying £75 per month. I have two questions:

Does this seem alot?

What kind of bandwidth is necessary for that number of unique users?

I'd be greatful of any advice as I'm pretty new to this sector.

Thanks

Greetings,

Does your site has Web/FTP stats like awstat or webalizer, you may get the exact figures on how much bandwidth been used per month.

Every site is different, but let us just pretend the average bandwidth usage per visit for your site:

1 visit = .4MB
300000 visit = 12000MB (12GB)

I would say you need around 12 - 17Gb at least per month. Again, it may not be an exact prediction.

How much bandwidth you get @ your current plan? You are paying too much for a shared plan. The price you are paying is for a dedicated server.

Hope this helps. Good luck


My only two cents

Yeah I think you pay too much. You would need more than 10gb atleast. Probably atleast 15 or more. We have alot of cheap deals on our homepage to give all your needs. Just a suggestion.

For that price you could definitely get a dedicated server as hawaiibeemer stated.

Regarding the bandwidth, just to be on the safe side, I would say a 20GB account would suffice and anyways most host offer free upgrades to higher plans. There are many offers out there for less than 15$ a month which is much much less than your paying right now.

Thanks for the help guys.

£75 a month does seem a lot of money to be paying BUT, you can never pay too much for a quality service. You do get what you pay for !

same here... I think you are paying too much

Hi elljay,
Why donot you try a Reseller plan. (for example as jodohost.com is providing 80GB monthly transfer in just $35 with all other resources. They have many Cheap plans with no additional fee for support, you can check at their site.)

As your site need aprox 12 to 20GB bandwith (i suppose) the reseller plan you canresell the resources you are going to get with the plan and earn more.

I hope it will work. Please write how is my idea.

- This estimate is generous, a summary report from our web server which hosts over 150 web sites is that average bandwidth per session (visitor) is between 250KB and 290KB.

So to accommodate 30,000 visitors you should only need 8.3 GB. Any plan supporting 10GB of Data Transfer should be ample.

£75 does seem rather steep, though you should know that in the UK bandwidth is much more expensive than in the US. So if you want to cut costs you might want to look accross the pond at a few US hosts. Remember though their business hours might be different to yours so want to ensure they provide comprehensive 24 hour support (not just 24 hour help-desk).

If you're worried about bandwidth consumptionand you don't want to move to the US, I'd look at ways of optimising your pages so they require less bandwidth. Good CSS design for example can save typically cut your bandwidth usage drastically. As can Compressing JPEGs to 50% Quality, and saving GIFs in lower colour formats.

David