I just got a potentional customer who've asked for 500mb and 50GB of bandwidth and I'm very in doubt on what to offer him or if I should offer him anything at all.

So I was looking for anyone with ideas or experiences on:

1) What I should charge

2) What this would mean for the server, load etc. (from what I can find out his curent site is a mix of static html and cgi scripts).

The server he would be hosted on would be an Intel Celeron 1.3GHz - 512 MB RAM - Ensim

Why not offer it to him? Just make sure it's all content that you accept...

I would offer that for $34.95 a month, not sure about others.

Not sure about server load, that would depend on a lot of stuff.

I think the best person to ask about if you should take that customer on is yourself. You should have a better idea of what everything costs than anyone else. I'm going to guess from that server config and say it's a rackshack bargain box, so you should have resources to burn. homeiss' price seems pretty reasonable if I'm correct in my guess. If you're using a more expensive setup then $50 - $60 a month would make more sense.

Greg Moore

Why would you not accept him as a customer?

I guess it all boils down to if this customer will take up too much resources on the server or not. Kind of need to put more than this one customer on the server in order to make a profit.

...and I really lack the experience to say how many of these larger customers I can fit on one server without the processor and memory being an issue. I'm not that worried about diskspace and bandwidth actually.

Take your overhead cost and use that to help determine how much should be charged for the % of resources they will be using.

Just when you think all hope is lost light shines in the darkness!

Finally a new host that considers important issues like processor and memory usage when calculating a price. Maybe some new hosts will make it until after the new year after all :)

By all means, try to make him your customer. Try to find out though where most of his GB usage is coming from and calulate that in your price. Pure downloads hardly use any server resources but if he has a very busy cgi forum with 1000 registered users then that is a different story. For an average site 34.95 seems fine indeed.

the celery boxen dont like forums. they dont like them at all. so ask the client what exactly his site does and how popular each section is. one busy forum can catapult your load to 1-2 easy.

The 500 mb isnt really a problem, Its the 50 gb bandwith, That is alot of bandwith. I would have to say around 45 bucks a month. If his site uses alot of bandwith, and you dnt have much, it can make your servers laggy

Just set in stone how much CPU useage and memory you will allow the client and advise them of that.

If they stay within the limits and don't crash your server, the bw isn't a problem if you have plenty. Just make sure the client is aware of exactly what they are entitled to regarding useage. If they go over and indeed do cause problems.. you can advise them that the site is not suitable for shared hosting... 50GB is a fair bit but again depends on what they are doing as to whether you will experience problems. :D

You should charge him 29$/month and ~30$ setup. YOu should also inforce the policy that he (and others) must watch their scripts to not use over 15% of system ressources on average, which is very fair.