epichouse

Hmmn. Perhaps it isn't quite the 'blag' I had originally suspected, although things seem to fluctuate here from what could be £400 for the whole year, to £400 per month. I will take it that it does need a dedicated host, or that a dedicated host with backups etc is the most secure one to have for their site. I am not sure how this stacks up or works out, but they are now claiming around 240,000 unique visitors a year, yet also saying they have between 2,000 and 8,000 unique visitors per day, with a regular huddle of 18,000 per week. It is a fairly popular site I suppose, so regulars will be sat there for hours a day, refreshing, clicking to replies, seeing if anything new has been published. I do not know how this reflects or affects hosting costs though. What would be the storage? The actual web articles? There are no 'files' as such, like zip files, or pdf files, or catalogues of data, or whatever. Also, lets say that the comment section is 25% those who use Discus or OpenId or whatever, but the rest are just submitted to the site. Lets say there are, on average, 70 comments per article. Does this impact heavily on storage, and if so, would they have improved running costs if they encouraged everyone to migrate to OpenId accounts, which I believe then places no burden on the site itself? Or does it not work like that, and the comments are data storage nomatter what service is run? I would ask the site for proof, but I suppose I am reluctant to do so as the atmosphere might get volatile as, given the circumstances, I would in effect be calling him a cheat or a swindler, lol. If I was going to spit the dummy out or make an issue of it, (even if it is saying "it is about time you looked for somewhere cheaper"), I would rather know what I was talking about, lol. In all liklihood I would not make a challenge, I was just suspicious that the costs could really be anywhere like £400 per month for some website space. It is hosted in the UK, which, given the general reputation for "rip off Britain", our delapidated communication networks that are often still in the dark ages (my connection is maximum 2.5mb! with no cable-tv anywhere near the area, etc), all that may all jump it up a bit compared to our American friends or others on the continent.

Thankyou to both 'lee the pee' and 'BlueDreamer' for such a quick response so far. I do not believe there is any need for a massive storage facility there. It does not, to my knowledge, store a lot of files. There might be, however, and I should have said earlier, a kind of sister-site for collecting current news affairs. But in all honesty, that could be hosted on wordpress or some kind of blogger provider. It even looks like a blog, I think. It will not have remotely the same traffic as the main site. I do not think it would make much difference, other than a registered domain. If they are that concerned for costs, as they claim, I do not really know why they cannot host the sister-site on something like google-blogger or wordpress. In my opinion, the whole main site could probably be on wordpress, but there must be some kind of major flaw or limitation for that service, considering what I have described as the above needs. Let me presume then that it is (on average) higher than 'medium' - say an upper medium sized site - to give the benifit of the doubt or take into account something I have missed..... Between your two replies it seems something like £150 to £250 per month is more along the lines of what to be expecting for something to handle that kind of traffic, on a 'dedicated' server - with a more 'all singing all dancing' fully managed and looked after service. Which is still quite a bit less than is claimed necessary. I suppose if you throw in some website design over the course of a year it might add a few hundred pounds over the 12 months. Where the rest is going, I am not so sure. I hope you both do not mind if I don't actually provide a link or indicate what site it is. I know it might be frustrating, but at this time I'd rather keep that quiet. Sorry. . I was just suspicious that they are milking it a bit. A 'little bit of something' is probably justified for them working at the site and making articles and giving out information, etc every day....but asking for 100 visitors to kind of direct-debit £4 a month, or whatever else, seemed a little much if the site was able to be run for maybe £50 a month or something - (as I had no idea what to expect). (Edit) I notice aove that a 'general shared plan' is as low as £50-£100 per year...does that mean they could get away with that kind of traffic (or more) for say £400 per year?! Not per month?! Either way, I am now a little bit wiser at an approximate cost. Thankyou.

Hello folks. I frequent a website which calls upon its commentors and readership for donations to keep the site running. I am sceptical of what is claimed to be the costs necessary. However, I do not really know anything about website hosting so I cannot make a fair judgement. I have tried to get a rough idea at professional hosting costs, but they all seem to want to make you call for a quote, but I am just after some rough ideas of whether the readership there are being taken for a ride or not. What I do know is that the site is occasionally prone to attacks, or attempts at being attacked, although not endlessly. I assume there would be some payment to me made to a web host to fend off these attacks and keep the site secure? Or that it might cost for some higher grade 'security' software or something if it is somehow being self-hosted.....? I also know that pressure may - very rarely - get put on the webhost (if there is one) to pull the website. But I will categorically state that is nothing illegal, or linking to anything illegal, or any other such underhanded activities. Let us just call it rivalry with competitors. It claims that the traffic is somewhere around 200,000 unique visitors per year.I am not sure if that has any bearing on the costs, but that is (roughly) what I am told the figures are. The comments to the site are mostly hosted by one of those 'discus' type commenting services, the front end is kind of Joomla template based, and it does not stream any of its own media - as links and contents to articles etc use youtube video or equivalent. It is claimed that the costs of running this site is, on average, around £90 per week, or approaching £400 per month. Now, I will praise one of the members of the site who seems to sit there day and night moderating comments to keep nut-cases and spammers out. He or she probably deserves a pint of lager and a pick-me-up from time to time for this thankless task. I don't think many would mind subbing the place a little bit if it meant it would otherwise disappear.....and of course, there may be the occasional website design tweak to pay for, although I gather most of it, like a simple face-lift or added menu bar can be done with off the shelf templates or CMS things like Joomla. It is not a corporate interest, it is a non-commercial site. but.....£400 per month for a website seems rather a lot of money to me. Yet that is what they are saying it needs to keep it rolling. Does it sound like it needs a "dedicated server" or something quite expensive? I do not know what is realistic. For all I know it might be £10 per month and these people are living off the back of the site readership (and the topic it represents too I suppose) whilst claiming poverty. On the other hand, it may indeed be something like £400 per month to have a specialist or 'personal' or independent website with that kind of traffic. I have no idea. Any insight would be appreciated, thankyou.

The FAQ idea sounds like it could be worth looking into. Some of those on your links sound quite powerful, but the pricing is somewhat astonishing, especially in terms of its 'user' limitations. However, that does not mean to say the idea of looking for FAQ software is a bad idea! I will do some digging on those kinds of programs this week too (as well as thinking about the legalities of the whole projects content now!). Cheers for all the suggestions so far - they have all been new avenues to me.

Blimey... this project has been on my mind for a long time, and I had never even thought about that aspect. I wonder if there is a way around it? Otherwise I might have to just run the risk or add some kind of disclaimer that if any author/owner wants an article removing, I will do so. Hmmn, that's a bit weak, I know. Take for example an article from the Telegraph about milk production in Britain, or an article from the Mail about how it took 250 miles to deliver a pasty to the supermarket right next door....or something from a medical journal about a new illness.... I guess I naively thought that once it was out and published on the net it was somewhat public domain. I am that used to seeing whole articles copied and pasted around forums and blogs that it never really occurred to me that there could be implications here. It would be quite annoying, because to find the kinds of things I have been collecting can take hours and hours through google searches, and one of the reasons I have been saving pages is that I kept adding them to bookmarks and then when I go back 6 months later the article may have vanished, or the site has moved/closed.... I thought it would be great to have this resource to save a lot of people a lot of time when they are looking for articles/info. However, I do not fancy the idea of being prosecuted for doing it. The chances are pretty slim, but you are right, I should have a look into that. Good thinking, cheers.

That's actually looking quite good. I had trouble navigating back to the root directories, and I cannot see any search facilities as yet....but, in terms of having information in a tree, and it being instantly viewable in the right hand side column, that's certainly the kind of thing I am looking for. Ps, £15 is certainly doable... I will go off and investigate it a bit more on their website. Thanks . I shall try and return a bit later.

Hello. I am a complete novice to website design, and have very little experience. I have no programming skills, no HTML skills, nothing. However, there is an altruistic based task which I would like to get off the ground and I do not know in which direction I should be looking to achieve it. I have loosely tried Joomla, Drupal, MediaWiki, KnowledgeTree and various similar packages like Google Docs - but after much headache trying to get these things going to "test out" - none of them seemed quite right. It got me wondering whether I am looking in the wrong direction, and whether a regular website or something else might be better. What I want to have, is a document system very much like Windows7 explorer (and its mechanics) - but based online for all to see. It needs to be online so it doesn't hammer by BT Broadband account bandwidth (and so that I do not need to run a PC day and night). Very much like Windows7 Explorer with the "preview pane" - you need to be able to browse files directly in the tree structure, search "inside of" html/mht,pdf,doc format files and preview all readable format results in a panel - or open in a 'new window' in real-time without having to download a file. I have an archive of around 4,500 website articles (in html and mht formats) from thousands of different sources, which I have saved to my hard drive in the last 4 years and I want to make them available for general free viewing as a "resource" site. However, spending £100's on designers or £1000's on software for such an altruistic purpose is really not what I have in mind. I will either need to do it myself, or get somebody I know (via friend of mine) to do it for free. I just need a shove in the right direction, I don't know what is the best "way" to achieve this kind of task. Do I need to continue with investigating the 'Drupals' and 'MediaWiki's' route, or do I need to be looking elsewhere? Any advice welcome. I have attached an image to try and show what I would like to make/have (from the perspective of a user accessing the site to use). The layout is quite important, and ideally needs to work something like the picture shows. Thankyou,