The web hosting cost is very low overall. With only a small amount of money, you can purchase a hosting package and put up your website. However, more and more cheap web hosting appear on the web, many hosting users begin to doubt that if we have paid too much for existing hosting services or not. How much should we pay for our hosting services? If you like to set up your own hosting business, how much would it cost?
Servers and other Hardware Costs
The popular setup for shared hosting nowadays are mostly DELL server, Intel Xeon servers. You can choose to lease, rent or buy.
If you buy: it’s going to be really expensive but you can get them custom built to suit you exact needs (as desktop quality PCs aren’t really recommended.).
Colocation: Your hardware is kept in a data center where you have 24/7 physical access and the data center merely provides electric and fast connection to the internet.
Pros: very flexible; you can build your own servers and determine how network is set up; easy set-up of a private network or a firewall; offers you free reign over hardware configuration
Cons: expensive; you’re responsible for your own hardware (repairs and replacements)
If you rent: The data server owns the hardware and rents it to you. Pros: they’re responsible for the hardware; faster repair times than collocation since there are always techs there to perform them for you; data centers are also able to buy servers in bulk so hardware costs are considerably lower.
Note that except the server, you may have to pay additionally for:
Server setup;
RAM Upgrades;
Hard Drives Upgrades;
Port Speed, Private Networks & Firewalls;
Server Management and Support;
Bandwidth Upgrades;
Remote Backup, RAID & IP’s;
Others…
Hosting Management Software
To automate all your hosting tasks. Includes (but not limited to): Operating Systems; Control Panels; Customer Support/Tracking/Management. Softwares mainly refer to hosting control panel and client management softwares. Take the popular cpanel and whmcs for instance, the monthly costs will be around $30. See details as following.
Linux OS – Free
Windows 2003 Web – $25/month
Windows 2003 Standard – $30/month
Windows 2008 Standard – $30/month
Windows 2008 Enterprise – $50/month
cPanel/WHM with Fantastico – $29/month
Space Cost
You have to find a space to place your servers. It is where you keep the servers (and run it from), unless we have our own datacenter. Overall cost per rack will around $300/mo with limited bandwidth. Mostly we will purchase extra bandwidth from upstream which will cost us several bucks per TB per month, from hosting end we always purchase several hundreds TBs per order, means there are at least $500 for DC service.
Customer Support Cost
If you are a technical and know-how geek, you can do the tech support by your own. Otherwise you have to pay a lot to hire senior tech person. Although the hosting support can be outsourced. But in the long run, you should build your in-house support team.
To sum up, we might need to pay about $20000 per server for the first month and at least $10000 per months after.
The final cost of a shared linux hosting plan should be around $5/mon. A shared windows hosting costs a bit higher, say $6/mon or $7/mon. The cost of VPS hosting is higher than a shared hosting but lower than dedicated server hosting. Depends on how many VPS account set up on a server, the cost could range from $20/mo to $30/mo per VPS hosting account.
