We recently completed a server upgrade to the TTZ Media Network in order to handle the influx of new affiliates. The new setup consists of the following.
- Two Load Balancers Servers
- Two Dual Quad-Core Xeon Clovertown 2.0Ghz web servers with 8 GB of RAM and RAID 1 hard drives
- One Dual Quad-Core Xeon Clovertown 2.0Ghz database server with 4 GB of RAM
- One Pentium E 1.6GHz backup server, 512 MB of RAM, 4 x 320GB IDE, 960GB Usable Space, RAID-5
- One router for inter server communication
The six server monster was supplied, set up and configured by BlueFur Web Hosting at a cost of $3,000 per month (get 15% off when you use the JohnChowRock coupon code). We are still doing some fine tuning. A setup like this is like a high end sport car – it need to be tuned to get maximum performance. Right now, we are trying to improve the syncing of the two web servers so information updates across both servers at the same time.
Many people will say the above setup can be had for a lot less than $3,000 per month and they would be correct – for unmanaged servers. However, this is a fully managed setup. If anything goes wrong, I don’t have to go down to the data center – it’s BlueFur’s problem, not mine. I’m not a server admin so I want a fully managed installation. You pay more but you have piece of mind.
How Much Should You Spend On Web Hosting?
This is an often asked question. Most people don’t have a problem paying $5 to $10 per month for web hosting. However, when it starts pushing into the thousands, it’s another story. My general rule of thumb is web hosting should not consume more than 5% of the site’s online income. That means if you’re paying $3,000 a month for web hosting, the site better be making at least $60,000 a month.
Many web publishers like to put off an upgrade for as long as possible but I think that is a mistake. You maybe saving money but I guarantee you any savings would be completely wiped out (and more) if the server goes down because you were too cheap to upgrade. At the rate TTZ Media is growing, I expect this upgrade to last a few months before I need to upgrade again.