hosting fees?

Question

What is a reasonable hosting fee for a auction site.

Answer 1

You will probably need a dedicated server, instead of shared hosting for an auction site. You will need a fast database that can process and post bids, big file capacity to accomodate all those auctions including photos, and bandwidth. With shared hosting, one box may have 400-500 websites, and that means databases won't always work or will work very slow.

Look at sites offering dedicated servers. It can be anywhere from $99 to even more than a thousand per month

Answer 2

Depends on how much traffic you expect. Ebay has three complete computer centers to handle all their traffic.

You won't have much traffic to begin with, and you may *never* have much business. I'd recommend that you start with a shared server, with a company that will let your site grow as your traffic grows. It's quite possible that you may grow to earn $200/month from your auction site, and never grow any more. If you're paying $10-15 monthly for your hosting that's a happy ending, even if it's not the one you wanted. If you're paying $300/month for your hosting, you're in trouble.

Although you can get a dedicated server for as little as $99, that isn't practical for an auction site, because it's an unmanaged server, a slow CPU, a single hard drive, and it probably is a limited amount of bandwidth, and Cogent bandwidth at that. By the time you get to the point you that you need a dedicated server, you'll need a fast CPU, multiple hard drives so you can do backup easily, and a lot of bandwidth. That means $400-500 or more. And at some point, if you grow enough, a single server won't be enough, and many hosting companies don't know how to spread you over multiple hosts.

At AmishHosting, our site talks about smaller packages because big hosting packages confuse potential customers. However, we can handle your needs for a long time to come. We're not the only ones capable of doing that, of course, and not every hosting company is a good match with every customer, but we're proud of the hosting we offer. Feel free to call us, toll-free, to ask questions, even if you decide to host with someone else. (Sooner or later, you'll end up recommending us to one of your friends, so we make out on this.)