Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I am currently using a virtual private server and shared hosting to host my sites. From what I see, the monthly income from Adsense is able to offset my monthly web hosting fees which is actually good, because I haven't put Adsense in more than 20 web sites I am running yet.
However, I dreaded the day when traffic to my sites would increase tremendously (which it will - judging by my stats) that I have to upgrade to a dedicated server soon which could cost around US$150 to US$300 per month. If this happened and I am not making more than US$300 per month it means I have to close down most of my dynamic sites (i.e forums, cms, etc) in order to cut cost.
So big earners out there, are using a dedicated server? I am sure most of you do but anyway I would still like to find out. If you do, how many dedicated server?
Is there anyone here who are using a dedicated server but not making enough profit?
Or is there anyone here who are so fortunate that they are earning in thousands or close to a thousand per month just by using a shared hosting?
Thank you for your input.
Personally, I'd see a dedicated server as more of a risk and a retrograde step: if a shared server goes down hundreds of other businesses will complain 'on my behalf'; if a dedicated server goes down I might lose a small fortune before I notice.
it really depends on your website!
images or not, if you have 99% dynamic content, all template and database driven sites, then your need for a bigger server should be quick.
we had to upgrade two times and currently use 1gb ram. with a few hundred visitors grabbing at the same time from scripts into several big databases it seems to be appropriate. 79$/month for the complete root-server is secondary to thousands of dollars per month.
a really good full blown dedicated server doesn't cost you more than 100$/month
That is what the first-tier cost me but when I added on cpanel (easy to use and useful if you want to lease space to others) and a managed care option (I'd rather blame someone else if I'm offline!) it brings it up to the $150 range.
your question might very well rephrased:
"Earning more than US$1,000 per month: Are you wearing blue jeans?"
I pay $2.99 monthly to host them all on a shared server. (Used to have problems, but the host moved me to a new server and things have been 99.9% up for the last 12 months)
Maybe we have the same host.
Last year, I paid $15/year ($1.25/mth) for a shared server to host one site which earned $x,x xx.xx a month with Adsense and the same amount with other affiliates. I have upgraded to $65/year plan to host 4 sites now.
My sites are all database driven using custom php drawing from mySQL databases. Since I wrote the php, I can tell you it ain't too good, but I realize my weaknesses. I keep the selects really simple, hardly do any inserts, and make sure the fields I select on are indexed.
With this setup, I can earn well over $1k/month from AdSense.
"Earning more than US$1,000 per month: Are you wearing blue jeans?"
I thought Larry Page and Sergey Brin wear blue jeans to work. RFOL
I have to run my site on a Dual Xeon, 2GB and Mirror disk pairs, not because I can afford that, but the applications load is really demanding.
You get 1.2 million page views a month, wow! I'd be seriously rich with that kind of traffic. IMHO, also consider optimizing/blending the adsense layout for the traffic you have now.
These are just a few of the questions, but, a great start!
I run 8 dedicated servers, all of which cost $200-$350 per month each.
An unreliable host will cost me several thousand dollars per day per server.....the hosting bill really doesn't matter, they just need to be able to service the requirements and have 100% uptime, and provide 100% customer service should a problem occur.
It is now 1:05am EST in my area, I can call my hosts and get connected to a level 3 tech who will know the answer to any problem I can throw at them! And have it fixed within the hour. If you run a profitable site(s), then being live is the only thing that matters!
Over the years I've tried many cheaper hosting solutions. None have worked out. So I pay for the best, they make my life easy, and pay for themselves numerous times over.
My Advice is simply to damn the costs and concentrate on the profit! I made several million (profit) last year using this phylosophy!
I am with this hosting company since 1996. Very good tech support.
I have not the time to learn all, what they know about server problems and security.
I always wonder how many people pay for a dedicated server just because their databases are not properly indexed.
Yes, figment88, the only times that I had my server not responding was when, while optimizing performance (!), I accidentally deleted the indexes to my main site's database. MySQL being that smart (TOO smart) it runs perfectly even without indexes, but of cource MUCH slower. Try joining 3 tables with 10.000 records each without indexes and you will get an idea.
Ahhhh....the great servers where the only support one gets is to have the drive reformated after a week of e-mails.
only support one gets is to have the drive reformated after a week of e-mails.
Hehe - I've never had an experience quite that bad, but yes, there is a fundamental difference in cost between managed and self-managed.
TJ
The trick with self-managed is to keep your eye on the ball with updates and set your server to self-update wherever possible. Oh, and backup regularly (I built a script to dump database, tar, gzip and backup via FTP to the other servers every 4 hours).
It's additional work maintaining (couple of hours a month), but it's saved me $25k over the last 2 years, so I figure that's a fair amount of downtime paid for if I have to suddenly switch to Rackspace in a hurry ;-)
The way I'm setup, I could switch host and be back up and running within 6 hours of the new boxes being ready to SSH into (assuming I'm awake).
TJ
My hosting service tells me that I need a dedicated server if I want to do that.
That's not right. Any (shared) server with support for PHP etc. is enough for just setting and checking cookies.
The site has had no real performance problems in 3 years. The only issues are when I want to do power user server-side tricks like page forwarding (.htaccess 301 redirects for IIS),automated SQL queries, or html as PHP page parsing which my hosting service won't allow/do for me.
It has happened before and you will go bonkers when it does.
You probably don't need a dedicated server unless you get 5,000-10,000 visitors per day and you have lots of photos on your site.
I'm at around about the revenue in the title, including non-AS sources, with about the visitor numbers JoeS describes, and I have lots of images!
I run the main site distributed across 4 servers (becoming 5 this week) round the world (Atlanta, London, Perth, with Singapore about to go live). All the servers are fairly low spec (from about 400MHz/1GB upwards), and the software is continually tweaked for performance.
My best deal is in Atlanta with US$89/month covering the dedicated server and 450GB/month bandwidth. AsiaPac hosting is at least twice as expensive, but I think it will (soon) be necessary to have local presense to do well in that market.
All machines are totally managed by me as root, with one actually at home on the end of my SDSL pipe!
This complexity is worthwhile because I have enjoyed creating the hand-crafted distributed application (which I publish all the code for, BTW), but unless you have LOTs of users or need LOTs of CPU time, or are a wannabe ubergeek like me, then a dedicated server is probably overkill, IMHO, so long as your hosting service does not try to squeeze too many virtual sites out of too few resources.
Rgds
Damon
