Website start-up and maintenance costs?

Factual Questions
1

Can those of you in the know give me a rough idea of what it would take, cost-wise, to start and run a website? The idea is not a debate or discussion board, but for the purposes of this question, let’s say it’s like the SDMB, but very picture heavy. So, in most cases people would post a few pictures, hoping others would comment on them. And no, it has nothing to do with rating someone’s looks.

If you could break it out as far as:

  • development: people, off-the shelf solution costs like the one used by SDMB (this will be kind of hard, I know, given the minimal information)

  • hard costs: servers and the like. Or can one just rent space that’s needed?

  • ongoing maintenance. Again for a benchmark, how much does it cost to keep SDMB operational?

Any info would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

2

You need to provide a LOT more information. Some websites are a single page, can be built in an hour and cost less than a penny a day to operate. Some websites have a huge infrastructure and requires extensive servers and maintenance.

Your question is like asking what is the cost and maintenance of life – if you are homeless and never hungry, there is little or no cost to your existence. If you are a large family with tons of assets, you require a lot more people and funds to continue your existence.

3

Yeah, that’s why I gave the SDMB as an example. Assume something of this scale, but with much less discussion and a lot more pictures.

4

There are a lot of factors to consider:
[ul]
[li]Do you anticipate hundreds of visitors per day, or hundreds of thousands? A lot of companies offer inexpensive hosting solutions ($100 a year or so) that include a wide range of tools and prebuilt solutions. If you’re doing something small-scale, one of those would work fine.[/li][li]Development depends on your own skills and on how much customization the site requires. If you’re doing something straightforward with people commenting on pictures and you have detailed specs for what you want, one skilled person could set it up in a week or two. Even coding from scratch, I doubt it would take me more than a few weeks to build the databases and code up the site.[/li][li]Costs of keeping the SDMB operational are held down because of the dozens of volunteers. One of the biggest pains in the neck is fighting off the spammers and trolls. In a large-scale site, that can take hours per day.[/li][li]Servers: unless you go very high volume, you don’t need to lease dedicated servers.[/li][/ul]

5

Disclaimer: I’m posting here not just to blatantly whore out my board (that skank), but also at magellan01’s request.

Anyway, as Gary said, what you absolutely don’t want to do is go with one of those bargain webhosting sites (e.g. $8/month for 8 TBytes of storage and unlimited bandwidth!) if you anticipate any real traffic or interactive content. A message board for example needs a fairly robust CPU, so those bargain hosts will be a disaster – Captain Ridley’s Shooting Party got kicked off his original host for domebo.net after like three days because he had the audacity to have the site actually do stuff.

My board is hosted at URLjet.com, which specializes in vBulletin hosting (they’ll even purchase and install the software for you, so it’s really easy). I have their mid-tier plan (vB Gold) which is more than enough for our traffic (600-1000 posts/day). It’s $35/month or $356/year if you pay in advance. If you got up to the SDMB level of traffic, you’d probably want a VPS (virtual private server) or even a dedicated server, but don’t start with more than you need. On-site search is probably the biggest challenge to hosting a message board with a large database, so limit that if you find yourself getting crappy performance (or set up a third party search box on the site.)

If you’re doing mostly image hosting, the main issue is storage and bandwidth. A dedicated vB host like URLjet may not be your best choice, since they don’t tend to offer monster storage (15GB w. my plan), since vB doesn’t really need it, but you could always start there and then switch hosts if you find yourself running out.

6

That’s very helpful, guys. Thank you. It seems like the costs are not prohibitive. I think I’d prefer to proceed in a way that being able to scale up is built in, even if it’s not the most efficient way to go in the short term.

Can you give me an idea of the Year 1 Cadillac version, one that would be able to handle the storage, handle thousands of visitors a day to start (allowing for great success thereafter), and would take care of spamming and trolling. Search wouldn’t be an important aspect of the site, though it would be nice to have something. I’m not concerned about the actual design of the site or the UI, as I have access to that.

Byt the way, Giraffe, I went to domebo.net and there’s no site. If the provider couldn’t handle it I would have thought he would have just moved the site to another one, no?

7

There are several services around that will deal with spam for you, with prices ranging from free to quite a lot depending on the circumstances (disclosure: I work for one of them, so I’ll refrain from naming any).

You will still need human moderators to deal with trolls, arguments, boutique spammers and so on. An enthusiastic community is invaluable.

8

Most hosts have different plan tiers, so once you start to push against the boundaries of a given plan you could seamlessly upgrade by just giving them more money.

I’m not 100% sure of what you’re asking here – are you talking about hosting or site software? If you want a message board, go with vBulletin for sure. You’ll still have to do all your own spam and troll management, but there are tools that make it easy to block problem spammers (or problem domains) and quickly ban a spammer and delete all their posts.

If you want some other dynamic content management system, like Drupal or Joomla, I’ll let someone else speak to those as I don’t have much experience with them.

They did move it to another server, and it was fine. Eventually they changed from phpBB to vBulletin software and changed the site name in the process – it’s mellophant.com now.

9

I would start by looking at 1and1

Then after you figure out what you’re going to need try

GoDaddy

I love 1and1, some people on the web have not liked them, but I have never had an issue with downtime and never had to wait more than a few hours for a reply from their tech team (email support is free, phone support costs)

Remember you can use content managment systems like Drupal or e107 and those are free

10

I strongly disagree with both of Markxxx’s recommendations: they’re both perfect examples of web hosts who wildly overpromise and underdeliver. Fine if you want to host some static content, useless for anything dynamic, IMO.

11

Giraffe, do you have a sense of how much bandwidth your site uses in a month?

12

I’ve got several websites on GoDaddy. Granted they don’t have lots and lots of traffic, but they are far from static too.

I suspect that the OP would be fine with the discount guys for now. At only $4 per month, it’ll give him plenty of time to get things up and running. If things pick up, OP can easily change webhosting providers with few problems. I’ve done that for the few sites I have where GoDaddy wasn’t able to provide what we needed.

BTW, Joomla has a BBoard extension that is quite nice.

13

Like many have said, it largely depends on a number of circumstances. Posting an image takes up bandwidth. If you have a host that gives unlimited up/down bandwidth and provides a really big pipe, this may not be an issue. If you’re limited this could be a problem, more costly than anything else.

The costs of building a site that handles upload of images, downloads, posts on them, possibly authenticated sharing (so that your users may want to control who sees the images) could be a bit expensive, but if you start small and only have a few users, and some how make some money (or if your rich and don’t care about that), then a hosted solution probably would be fine.

If you are planning on growing, maybe working with other services like flickr, facebook and the likes, you’ll probably need some custom development. Most important on this is figuring out what you want to go with… php, java, .net. I myself am a java guy. Most people seem to find hosted solutions with php.

It also depends on what sort of funding you have to pay for all this. You of course have to manage more than just the hosting cost, getting help if need be, extra features, etc.

Sadly, many people want to start a site and get suckered in to the bid sites, where they hire a guy in india for $7 to build them a site for a month. What almost always results is nothing close to what was wanted, and you’ve wasted a lot of time… and time is money. My costs are quite expensive, but then, I know how to set up large scale sites from the front end UI/web pages, to the back end database, transactions and so forth. It’s not cheap, but I have a lot of experience with it, so you get what you pay for.

So really it depends on a lot of what you need. Do people log in, make connections to other friends… or do they just post a pic and allow the world to see it? Is there any login required at all, or is it for anyone to post anything for anyone to see? The list goes on.

Good luck.

14

I own a couple of websites but nothing that gets a lot of traffic. They are supercheap in general unless you plan on building the next Facebook or Amazon.com. Buying a domain name only costs $10 or so a year and often comes free with a hosting bundle which itself tends to be really competitive and cheap.

Message board software like phbBB is often included for free and it isn’t exactly the same as the software that runs the SDMB but it is pretty close. The tools they give you to build the website itself are pretty easy for a semi tech-savvy person. As others pointed out, it depends on the traffic that you expect to have and the current cheap plans are still pretty generous with that and upgradable on the fly.

I can literally have a domain registered, a bare bones website up and running with message board software like this one with no posts online in less than 2 hours total for a total cost of less than $200 total for a year of service and probably much less for a premium small business plan. The most important thing is choosing the right host. The host links for the host providers already given are legit and fine for most people. They do what they say they will and it is scripted and automatic. You just choose a domain name, pick a plan, and pay. They send you an automatic e-mail a few minutes later after their servers lay the foundation for you. It comes down to tech support and the bundled software you get with it.

Custom development is expensive and tiresome no matter how you do it. Unless you are planning something big, just stick to what is customizable and free via opensource and work with it. There is a lot of free stuff out there.

15

This is why you see the YMMV disclaimer so often. I’ve used GoDaddy for years and they’ve been great to deal with. I don’t have any super-high-bandwidth sites, but some are pretty complex database structures, and I’ve never had any downtime or performance issues. You can call their tech support and get a real, live human being that actually knows what’s going on and fixes problems.

16

I run a site hosted by A2Hosting, with (so they say) unlimited storage, and unlimited data transfer allotment. I’ve never had a problem with them in a year, and it has been trouble free to set up and maintain.

Now, I just run some info on a CMS (Joomla!), and a set of forums (phpBB 3.x), with a couple databases and limited email services for administrative users.

The site itself runs me about $120/year, and another $12/year for each domain on it (I currently host 3).

The hosting company provides many services, in addition to the database servers and email servers, most of which are free, but some are an additional cost.

I do not run any ecommerce sites, although that is provided for if you need them.

Basically, I wanted to set up some sites mostly in order to have ad-free, keyword-free places for my users to hang out, and while the above price isn’t the cheapest around, it was the best I found in terms of no restrictions and service up time.