Is running a website that costly??

[Red Squirrel]

We used to host Woot.com before they were acquired by Amazon.

During a wootOff, they'd sometimes use up to 700Mbps bandwidth. They'd have to tell us when they were doing wootOff's so we didn't mistake the spike as an incoming dDos attack.

Even at $10 per 1Mbps, which is good pricing for a multi-homed, backbone peered bgp uplink, they were spending at least $5,000 a month JUST for bandwidth. (700Mbps x $10 is $7k) Not to mention several racks of servers, and each rack had (4) 20a/120v circuits. ($300 per month each circuit). All in all I think they paid about $15,000 per month for hosting.

How much did they pay their admins? They had quite a few people working on managing the site and the infrastructure. I'm guessing at least 5 people so that's probably $25,000 a month there.

I'd wager woot.com cost at least $50,000 a month for them to operate.

Ouch, they probably should have looked at paying for an unlimited plan, probably cheaper than paying 95th percentile or whatever it is they were paying.

What I wonder is how these sites manage to stay alive. I'd have to remortgage my house or dig into home equity just to make that payment. D:

Like look at Youtube, I can't imagine how much the bandwidth must cost. There's no way the little ads that everyone just closes/blocks comes even close to paying that bill.

 

[Kroze]

A lot of it has to do with how much traffic your site gets and how fast you want the pages to load. Is it a static site, or a database driven site?

A basic html site is not going to take many resources. Install wordpress, joomla, vbulletin,,, then you add a database server and disk access time.

My hosting bill is $100 a month.

But then again, my pages do not take 10+ seconds to load either.

I'm thinking about making a DIY car repair site. With lots of pics and tutorial on basic maintenance and through each tutorial, ill list the tools needed along for the affiliated link for the tools. That along with google Adsense.

What differentiate my site from others is that it'll have a lot of pics and in depth pics showing how its done. Unlike ehow.com which is all text.

It's more of a hobby but I hope it can generate enough money to cover the expenses.

 

[Texashiker]

I'm thinking about making a DIY car repair site. With lots of pics and tutorial on basic maintenance and through each tutorial, ill list the tools needed along for the affiliated link for the tools. That along with google Adsense.

For that kind of stuff you should open a youtube page to go along with that site.

In 2007 one of the top earners on google adsense ran a home do-it-yourself youtube page and website.

http://bloggerlounge.dakno.com/2007/01/21/top-adsense-earners/

6. Tim Carter (AskTheBuilder.com) $30,000 per month – Tim Carter is the founder of a popular website about home improvement that receives thousands of page views each month, he successfully blended the AdSense ads to make more $30,000 per month.

 

[killerjello]

Running a website is not that much if you are starting, Im currently paying about $25 a year for the website and web hosting for my blog / personal site. I am on a unlimited disk space / bandwidth plan and notice no slowness or downtime. I think the reason is because my provider is using CloudLinux on the server which limited how much server resource a user can use.

 

[Vdubchaos]

I'm thinking about making a DIY car repair site. With lots of pics and tutorial on basic maintenance and through each tutorial, ill list the tools needed along for the affiliated link for the tools. That along with google Adsense.

What differentiate my site from others is that it'll have a lot of pics and in depth pics showing how its done. Unlike ehow.com which is all text.

It's more of a hobby but I hope it can generate enough money to cover the expenses.

Nice idea, but keep in mind that Video > pics and there is already videos on you tube to cover just about any general car repair you can imagine.

 

[M0oG0oGaiPan]

Nice idea, but keep in mind that Video > pics and there is already videos on you tube to cover just about any general car repair you can imagine.

That's true but making a site would be a good learning experience either way. His videos might be better or he might be more interesting than other guys. There's also a lot of older videos that are low res and those are hard to watch nowadays imho.

I'll give you a couple of examples. I was trying to "how to get a motorcycle on a front stand". There's all kinds of ways people get it solo. One guy hopped on the front somehow. A lot of people recommend a block of wood under the side stand. Another search was "how to change sidestand spring." There are a few ways to get the spring off. Some recomended removing the screw that holds the whole piece on. Some recommend using a screwdriver and pliers. Then there's the penny trick way, which is pretty cool.

His niche is definitely competitive and it'll be tough but it probably has a payout rate also. Amazon has terrible comission rates but if you sell a $500 part at 6%, you'll still net $30. The nice thing about Amazon is you also get paid for anything else the person buys after they go through your link. Such as books, digital movies, edible underpants. I mention Amazon because they're probably the easiest affiliate to get in on. Some of the other ones will reject you unless you get a certain amount of traffic.

 

[ViviTheMage]

I'm thinking about making a DIY car repair site. With lots of pics and tutorial on basic maintenance and through each tutorial, ill list the tools needed along for the affiliated link for the tools. That along with google Adsense.

What differentiate my site from others is that it'll have a lot of pics and in depth pics showing how its done. Unlike ehow.com which is all text.

It's more of a hobby but I hope it can generate enough money to cover the expenses.

Don't most people just go to the enthusiast site for that? It would be neat if someone would compile it all into one/archived version ... it seems like most DIY threads end up without pictures after a few months.