mph88888 - 6:36 am on Jul 30, 2004 (gmt 0)

Just got back from a business trip folks, so I'll continue with a few more comments. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this, this has been a very useful and insightful thread.

Just to clarify, we are site with tens of millions of page view a month. Our site has thousands of pages. there are dozens of domains that each serve content in different (and in some cases complicated) ways. Several disparate content management systems are serving the pages from various locations. So, we made the decision to look at vendors in the high-end of the market only, of which in the UK we found there are really only 3 or 4 such companies. 3 of the ones we looked at are ASP model suppliers which are our preferred method of delivery for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the ability to bypass the IT 'powermongers' who made it extremely difficult for us to use and get value from our previous server-side system.

A few more questions on the pricing models. We are happy to pay the monthly fee based on page views, however the vendor's pricing matrix is quite linear, where I think it should flatten out at the higher volumes increase. I suppose more hardware is involved as traffic increases to maintain the SLA we have asked for, but this really seems to be a tough area for us to understand. In other words, should an increase from 5 to 10 million page views cost the same as the increase from 11 to 20 million, or should there be substantial economies of scale?

I have pushed hard on the trial, but the vendor we are negotiating with claims that they simply cannot do this as an ASP model. It's too expensive for them. They have offered a 3-month break clause, but this means we still need to pay the implementation charge which is quite high in it's own right. They work with two other large competitors in our space so they do have credibility and a proven track record, which is why we had shortlisted them in the first place.

They have also provided a quote for data archiving beyond 90 days. Is this normal from what you all have seen? They will restore from backup free or charge in the case of a failure, however archiving base data is a different issue. Do any of you have similar arrangements, and if to how long do you tend to archive the base data? Just to be clear, this vendor will keep aggregates for two years as part of the monthly charge, but the base (raw) data is a separate issue altogether and takes up a HUGE amount of disk space.

On the implementation fee, they have attributed a portion of the cost to 'hardware and software provision', which is fine as they are hosting the service. What I would like to clarify is, do they buy hardware and software for every new client, or would they have a massively scalable system at their data center that can easily turn on new clients a little or no additional cost? My view is that the latter may be true for 'cookie cutter' sites and the lower end vendors, but that the larger, more bespoke clients may need to be on their own hardware/software.

As for the need for consulting, the reason we wanted this was what our e-business team are simply too busy to go through the reports on a regular basis ourself. We are happy to have a consultant summarize, interpret and report a weekly/monthly summary in the format we like. It also gives the vendor an opportunity to get close to our business, which we see as a good thing in the long run.