Forum Moderators: phranque
Customer wants to hook up a shared hosting plan at around $20 a month, offering 5TB of bandwidth.
I understand that a clone of a popular site will not enjoy the same success, but I also understand visitors browsing 50-100 500k images at one sitting is going to make a huge bandwidth bill.
How can I estimate bandwidth usage for the first few months, before any ad revenue would likely start coming in? Or do you just go with the flow, pay overage penalties and fly to the next host by the seat of your pants? I want to plan this out, customer needs hard numbers to convince him that $20 shared hosting isn't going to perform well even in the beginning, if the site is well marketed and what not.
BTW, no way will they actually let you USE 5TB/month. It's a fantasy figure.
What do you mean by that?
I understand that it's not reasonable to actually expect 5TB of bandwidth, even though it's advertised. I guess I'm wondering how to start small and move up in hosting as needed without driving people away or causing outages. The customer will understand when the site gets locked out for heavy usage, or he receives a huge overage bill.
" There went $20, while you were typing... "What do you mean by that?
I mean they are being penny-wise and pound-foolish.
It will probably cost several months of the difference in hosting cost for you to justify the need for better hosting.
