Hello,

I've a problem... could you please help me? The situation is the following, I'm running a major and very well known website which makes about 2 to 3,000,000 (real) pageviews per month.

This website is free for use therefore all the money I earn is due to banner ads sellings.

I'm telling you this, to be able to understand HOW important an excellent hosting is for me. If my website is down for 1 day, well this is much much much much worse than just beeing a webspace reseller (if you are a reseller and your server is down for a day, you have angry customers and for 99% you will be able to cope with it without loosing money, I would permanently loose users for this = money).

I'm hosting on a virtual account at Verio since about 2 or 3 years, I did never have problems, uptime was a real 99.9%, and I had 3 or for tiny problems during all this years. But there are a couple of reasons now which are really making me considering to leave them.

I know, you will be saying... "hey greenalien" get a dedicated!" Hemm, no way. I do not want a dedicated! I've my reasons for that.

Now I'm asking you: "To which hosting company (unix based) would YOU go, if you where running such a website?"

Right now I'm paying about $90 per month, and I really can't afford to spend more.... therefore I would really apreciate your ideas/suggestions/comments by answering my question :-).

I was looking at MChost, but.... would you go to a hosting company with a great reputation, which is "specialised" into reseller plans? Am I wrong by thinking: they are experts in selling and supporting resellers, but not website owners? Please, correct me if I'm wrong

Thanks!
Greenalien

P.S. please do not PM me with offers as it did just happen... I'm interested and thankful for help and suggestions more than into offers ;)

Basically you need to get a dedicated, or take those peoples offers
Otherwise what other information can one give you?

Personally I would get a dedicated server, but they are obviously
out of your price range since 90$ is your budget.

I'm sure there are people on this board who has similar problems
and will be able to give you a better answer to your question.

so, good luck and I hope you keep us informed on how things
went.

Originally posted by greenalien
I'm telling you this, to be able to understand HOW important an excellent hosting is for me. If my website is down for 1 day, well this is much much much much worse than just beeing a webspace reseller (if you are a reseller and your server is down for a day, you have angry customers and for 99% you will be able to cope with it without loosing money, I would permanently loose users for this = money).

:confused:
You mean you need good up time?

well i need an excellent uptime with a great support and this should all be on a rock solid server...

Your best bet would be to get a managed dedicated server with an uptime SLA - however, these will cost more than $90 / month.

Something just doesn't make sense there.:confused: You say you are getting "2 to 3,000,000 (real) pageviews per month" and yet you can't afford more than $90/month.

...Man, I know the internet advertising market has cratered over the last year, but if you were serving up 2 ads on a page and only getting $1/CPM you'd be taking in $5,000/month averaging your pageviews at 2,500,000. Many sites are still getting over $3/CPM so I just can't figure out why you can't make more money with that number of pageviews.:confused:

By the way, what's your site?

I'm really wondering that I keep on beeing asked the same question, even by "experts"! calculation with 3,000,000 pageviews: the best agency is able to sell 10% of the available place and therefore: 300,000 banner ads sold per moth... and this means $3/cpm = $300 per month!

I guess this question explains why so many companies i contact try to push up the prices to heaven.... or try to sell deds. but if you are interested i can sell you 3,000,000 banner ads per month even for $2 cpm! ;-)

It sounds to me like you need to put some hard work into trying to sell some of your inventory yourself and not rely so much on third parties to sell it for you.

greggish, i do not want to sound offensive, I'm here asking for comments/suggestions about hosting... and not to listen comments about MY business. If you are so good, go and sell banner ads for me! I'll give you 25% revenue

You still haven't told us your site :confused:

again, I'm not here to tell around the url of my site... I'm here asking for help about finding the right hosting company. if you think you are the hosting company that suits to me, well send me a pm. really, please stop going OT

Hey...this is a "discussion board" you know. For a guy who doesn't want to have a disccusion you sure picked an interesting place "not to have one".:D :D

Dedicated is the way to go for total control. I'm not a hosting company but I'd be interested in sharing a dedicated server with you. I've already PMed you

Ok well as everyone says there really isn't much choice bar dedicated. I would recommend you share a dedicated with rackshack. You have plenty of bandwidth 300gb!! Go halves with someone and you will have 150gb for $50/month give or take.

See if you can follow this...

If you have to get to work, and the *most* important thing to you is that the person next to you doesn't stink and that you get to work on time, your best choice would be to drive in your own car, and not take the city bus. If you then tell me that you can't afford a car and don't want to take the bus, what are your options?

The distant point is, that by nature, a shared server isn't going to provide you with what you need. The only way you'll be able to control uptime is to pick the most solid network you can, and throw your own (or lease a dependable) dedicated server on it. *But* it would be difficult to achieve this for $90, plus you say you don't want to go dedicated for your reasons.

Basically you want it both ways, and I don't think it is possible to guarantee that you'll get to work on time and that the person next to you doesn't smell of tuna fish sandwiches.

Ill help you out by selling some CPM's to some friends if you email me with your website URL.

Jim

Perharps getting a semi dedicated server would help. It's not really a dedicated server for your own use, but you would be sharing the server (usually very powerful one) with few other people (the number is not really important as long as the server is not overloaded). This will be a good solution if you do not want to be hosted (and finally kicked) with hundreds of other account, yet you do not have the money and capability to admin a dedicated server yourself. It actualy works great with two busy sites hosted on my server right now (doing around 4.5 millions pages per month), no major complaints with the performance of the server. Hope this gives you another option.

cheers,
:beer:

thanx... but... which company does offer this and which one can you suggest or recommend? I've been asking a lot of comp. about their REAL policy of usage... nobody was really able to tell me if the server would suite me, i would suit the server ;)

sharing the server (usually very powerful one) with few other people

That's what I told him. No cigar. :bawling:

Right, seems to me as you have 2 problems. First I get the impressions you want to spend as little as possible on a dedicated server, $90 won't do it and a virtual account won't handle that many page views (unless all of your site is in plain text, it would help to have your URL). So basacilly your going to have to be more open minded than what you are now. There's a great offer going on here http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=29883 for only $125 a month and you get 300GB of bandwidth.

As for ad revenue, although CPM agency's aren't paying much at the moment I can recommend a few that will perform better than your 10% sold ad inventory. If your interested I will help you to earn thousands of dollars each month, all it takes is some hard work, and maybe the odd-pop up now and again.

Keep in mind that CPA and CPS ads are currently the highest paying ads going.

If you don't want a dedicated server you might want to take a look at Virtual Private Servers. You get a lot of the nice features of a dedicated at a cheaper cost.

There are a couple of companys that post here that offer them. Remarkable Hosting seems to be a pretty good one. I am looking at getting a private server with them for the company that I work for. $90 will get you a VPS with 2.5GB disk space and 50GB of transfer.

Richard

Curious, why greenalien didn't want this opportunity to get his site mroe visitors.

It seem he didn't mention how much bandwidth he is currently using. Maybe try the private server from tera-byte, or get some money to setup a server with rackshack, and then pay $99 per month.

He said he wants 0 downtime so why are you recomending rackshack?????????????

What sorta Transfer are you putting through. Is the content legal.?

Personally, I'd recommend CommuniTech.Net. They would have a good plan for you. Check 'em out at: http://www.communitech.net

I don't know how much bandwidth you need but this might work
http://venturesonline.com/hosting/v650.html

or Weinbar posted a special in the advertising area that included a ton of space and bandwidth..

sure the content is legal, and its not an adult site. 30 gigs of traffic per month... thanks again :)

Originally posted by dustin[s31]
Personally, I'd recommend CommuniTech.Net. They would have a good plan for you. Check 'em out at: http://www.communitech.net

are you CRAZY?!:eek:


also greenalien, if the content is legal why wont you give out the URL? are you trying to hide something?

just playin ;)

3,000,000 Real page views per month at 30GB...
Lets do some rough calculation:
30GB = 3809280 KB
3809280 / 3000000 = 1.269KB per view...
I know its rough calculation, but as simple estimated KB/PerView this really looks weird... what the hell is your website, a txt file? =\

With 2-3 million page views I could easily host you for free and take care of the server administration as well. Shouldn't be that difficult to earn in the money for the server unless your site is focused on something really weird.

When you speak of page views are you talking about "hits" by any chance? What program is giving you these stats by the way?

I'm asking only because if you had that much traffic, I'm pretty sure a shared hosting server would be choking already.

So why hasn't Verio called? Weird.

I agree with Skeptical's question. 3 million page views or hits?

3 million page views per month on any decent shared server = continous load average of 30.00+ = system death.

Your numbers don't add up. 3 million page views @ 30 gig per month? Is it a one page web site?

I host two quite buy VBullettin sites with the following projected number for this month: the first one does about close to 1 million page views and about 4.5 million hits and the second one has about 3.8 million page views and about 23 million of hist this month. Projected transfer for these two sites for this month is about 75 GB. Host these two sites on a P3 800Mhz (dual capable) with 2GB of RAM. Typical server load is about 3-7 (during busy days). Server never goes down for the last 4-5 months ....

3 million page views with 30 GB transfer is very likely ... Nothing is very wrong about that. Just need a good/powerfull server, especially if you are doing a lot of dynamically generated pages (php/mysql). In this case, a RAQ won't do it :)

cheers,
:beer:

Ok, I hear what you are saying...but those VBulletin sites are running the bulletin boards and nothing more, right? No MP3 download farm, right?

greenalien still has not disclosed what his 30 gig / month site really is.

I agree that it is reasonable to state that 30 gig / month bulletin board sites are reasonable, but my gut tells me that greenalien's site might be a download farm, which as we all know, can be rather unpredictable on a month to month basis.

IMHO. I could be totally off-base. In which case, All your Base are Belong to Us ;)

I think he mentioned the contents are legal and non-adult. So even if it's legal mp3 download farm, who should care? In fact, if most of the traffic comes from static pages (downloadable files, etc), than even if it consumes 30GB of transfer/mo, it could still be easily hosted on shared account. Even a RAQ can server hundreds of GB of transfer/mo if it's serving most (if not all) static pages. But it turns out his current/old host is having problem to host him on a shared accounts (hence he is thinking of moving). For me, this shows that most of the traffic does not come from downloadable files, but most likely dynamically generated pages that rely heavily on mysql (my guess).

cheers,
:beer:

I recommend www.liquidweb.com , www.site5.com , www.phenominet.com (they have a 100GB transfer plan for $600/year) . Or if your site is really that popular, go for a server at www.rackshack.net

Green... check out the posts on that company first.


One of my friends uses rackshack, he keeps trying to get me to sign up... do you have to know a lot about dedicated servers to use their services?

ochiba

well I'm not here to discuss about my website but to ask for suggestions about hosting. no, it's not a download or mp3 or something like that site. there is a small download area which makes about 1gig of traffic per month, but not more coz the website is not download related.

30gigs -> you are right... the average per page would be 10kB... i did never make this calculation. I'm using an old version of analog for the stats, and i do not have any other tool to measure the traffic. But I guess the pageviews are correct coz measured by the ad server of my agency. therefore if there are between 4 and 6,000,000 banner ads per month, and there are 2 banners per page, 2 to 3,000,000 pageviews should be correct. the banner does not refresh.

server loading -> never had problems with that till now

Why is it such a problem to post a URL...if the site really exists? (30 gb aint download aint BB aint php/mysql)

You are here to ask for advice....and the advice can only be as good as the information given on which to base it. You want suggestions on hosting a "site", but will not divulge what the site is.

There are many here who could give you excellent advice...but they need the rest of the story to do so.

I just don't understand why some people are really pushy ... For me, he is clear enough ... his site is non-adult, legal, and is not a download farm. Needs roughly 30GB of transfer/mo. Current shared hosting environment does not fit him. Looking for a (semi) dedicated server. What other information do you need? The URL? Why does a URL matter for finding a host?

cheers,
:beer:

Originally posted by greenalien
server loading -> never had problems with that till now

I thought you didn't haave a dedicated server?:eek: :confused:

Originally posted by dektong
IThe URL? Why does a URL matter for finding a host?

cheers,
:beer:

Just curious :)