Budgeting 2009 Web Strategy – Hosting

January 5, 2009 by Andy Brudtkuhl - Leave A Comment

Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.

Last year this time we posted about setting up a budget for your web strategy.. So, we decided to do the same this year. When we plan a web strategy for our clients it always includes a cost budget and time budget . Here’s a generic version of our web strategy budget, including what 48Web budgets for our web strategy. This post turned out extremely long so we’ll be releasing it in chunks – for easier reading. In this post we’ll cover the hosting aspect of your web strategy.

Hosting
Cost: $5-$100/mo based on your needs
Time: 1 time setup approximately 2 hours, 4 hours maintenance per month
We raised our cost estimate this year because, well, our hosting costs went up and we added some new services. Our costs went up because we host many websites and the traffic for some of these sites went up tremendously in 2008. If you are running a single website or blog your hosting costs should not be more than $15/mo.

Tools and Services
At 48Web, we use Mosso for our production environment (See our case study [pdf]). Mosso is $100/mo and offers us a killer service, a very scalable platform, and unlimited websites. Follow Mosso on Twitter. We use Dreamhost for a low-cost development environment that costs us approximately $84/year.

Another facet of hosting we should discuss for use in 2009 are Content Delivery Networks. As this market becomes more and more commoditized, SMB’s have available to them high end, scalable, and very affordable systems for distribution of content – audio, video, images, etc. We have been using Amazon’s S3 service for our CDN over the past year. In 2009 we are looking into Mosso’s Cloud Files service as well as Amazon’s own CDN built on top of its S3 storage service called CloudFront.

If you have any questions, comments, feedback, disagreements, or feel we missed something – let us know in the comments.

Next up in Budgeting 2009 Web Strategy – Analytics

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!