How expensive would a bebo like site be to run?

j2u

Hi i was just wondering how expensive would a site like bebo be to create and run?
Not saying im going to compete im just curious given the type of site that it is how expensive initial set up would be.

Thanks

Boston

costs would scale with number of users. Maintainance would be where the cost would be.

phil

If you're talking about bebos actual running costs, they're easily up in six figures before salaries are paid I would imagine. That's basically the running costs of the hardware required to power the site. Hard to even guesstimate without knowing much about their architecture. Salaries and office running costs would be the most expensive part of that operation presumably.

Nice thing is though, you can scale up from something much smaller, providing you have the experience and smarts.

j2u

how do you mean scale up?you mean start small and then increase as the amount of users increase?

forbairt

you should probably have a look here ... as well

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055131212

AARRRGH

To hire a cheap developer on scriptlance.com to (properly, professionally) develop something like bebo - circa $2000
Monthly hosting costs (assuming you get a few million visitors per month) - circa $400

So it's not that expensive. However, I run a good few websites and in my experience there is a continuous low level of work required to run a decent website. You can't just set it up and forget about it.

However it could certainly be done.

Your most expensive cost (and most time consuming task) would be marketing the site. Setting up a site is fairly easy - getting people to use it - that's another matter altogether.

EDIT: Note I am not saying this is how Bebo did it, or how much their costs are; I'm just saying you could do it like this, on the cheap, and you wouldn't be too far off.

mneylon

dublindude wrote:

To hire a cheap developer on scriptlance.com to (properly, professionally) develop something like bebo - circa $2000
Monthly hosting costs (assuming you get a few million visitors per month) - circa $400

So it's not that expensive. However, I run a good few websites and in my experience there is a continuous low level of work required to run a decent website. You can't just set it up and forget about it.

However it could certainly be done.

Your most expensive cost (and most time consuming task) would be marketing the site. Setting up a site is fairly easy - getting people to use it - that's another matter altogether.

You're over simplifying things drastically

Any of the larger sites with lots of concurrent connections and lots of user generated content (eg. image galleries etc.,) will require a LOT more than a couple of hundred dollars worth of hosting if they are going to scale beyond a few users

AARRRGH

blacknight wrote:

You're over simplifying things drastically

Yes, this is a discussion forum, not a meeting to discuss all costs and possibilities.

blacknight wrote:

Any of the larger sites with lots of concurrent connections and lots of user generated content (eg. image galleries etc.,) will require a LOT more than a couple of hundred dollars worth of hosting if they are going to scale beyond a few users

No - I used to run a website with a few million unique visitors per week (I have since sold it.)

$400 will get you about four dual core servers in the US (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=36)

jmcc

dublindude wrote:

To hire a cheap developer on scriptlance.com to (properly, professionally) develop something like bebo - circa $2000

Maybe for the web design but a hell of a lot of work goes into the database side of a site like Bebo. You are very, very unlikely to find people with that kind of database expertise hanging around on freelance sites. Such an operation is lightyears beyond a mickey mouse MySQL db for a small business with a few items.

Then there is the whole issue of infrastructural architecture. Again this is not a shared hosting project. You have to get the design right the first time because there is no second chance. Again you are into a level of design that is way beyond what most sites require. The design has to be both flexible and scalable. For example, running a forum site for a hundred users is relatively easy and cheap. At one thousand users, it gets slightly more expensive but the same solution can be tweaked to cover it. But at ten thousand or one hundred thousand users, it requires completely different resources, more people and a very robust design.

Monthly hosting costs (assuming you get a few million visitors per month) - circa $400

The bandwidth for a few million busy vistors (each spending a few minutes doing database intensive things like updating links to other users and updating their pages) would cost more than that. The cost for the database servers and the webservers would be well beyond that. You might get away with $400 for a relatively static site. And we haven't even mentioned users deciding to store their own content yet.

Regards...jmcc

eth0_

dublindude wrote:

$400 will get you about four dual core servers in the US (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=36)

Yes, if you ignore the question of bandwidth consumption :rolleyes:

Do bebo/facebook/myspace publish how much bandwidth they use on an average day? Would be interesting to find out.

AARRRGH

jmcc, a lot of very skilled developers use freelance sites. I use those sites to outsource projects (about 100 projects so far.) You can get great work for cheap. $2000 would easily cover the development fees for a bebo style website.

Regarding the hosting - perhaps $400 is a bit ambitious - but again, via webhostingtalk, you could get 8 unmanaged dual core servers for that price.

As stated in a previous post, I used to run a very popular website. It was reasonably static, but had millions of database reads per day. A single server handled it fine.

Also, in my job my team looks after a well known hosted product. We only need two servers. The product would be a lot more complex than bebo. So I think people underestimate how much you can get away with using only a few servers.

AARRRGH

eth0_ wrote:

Yes, if you ignore the question of bandwidth consumption :rolleyes:

4 servers x 2 TB each = 8 TB of bandwidth per month.

Do I need to :rolleyes: ?

eth0_

dublindude wrote:

4 servers x 2 TB each = 8 TB of bandwidth per month.

Do I need to :rolleyes: ?

8TB of data.....for $400 dollars?
Do you have a url for that?

AnCatDubh

jmcc wrote:

Such an operation is lightyears beyond a mickey mouse MySQL db for a small business with a few items.

hmnnn.... the same mickey mouse MySQL that boards.ie runs on

It just happens that i caught sight of a commercial proposal for doing just such a thing this afternoon - the set up fees quoted are typically between €12k - €15k and service fees are charged out on a per 1000 users basis at approx €3k per qtr.

jmcc

dublindude wrote:

jmcc, a lot of very skilled developers use freelance sites. I use those sites to outsource projects (about 100 projects so far.) You can get great work for cheap. $2000 would easily cover the development fees for a bebo style website.

Dublindude, a database developer/architect is somewhat different from the average webdev. While it might be possible to get a good webdev for that price, a good db head would cost many times more than $2000. I still think that there is a huge gulf between the complexity of a database running a simple site and one that requires continuous reading and writing with thousands (or even hundreds) of simultaneous users.

As stated in a previous post, I used to run a very popular website. It was reasonably static, but had millions of database reads per day. A single server handled it fine.

Serving a site with millions of reads is easy - the data from queries can be cached and there are other tricks that can be used. However when there are database writes involved, it gets a bit more complex.

So I think people underestimate how much you can get away with using only a few servers.

I don't. Again it gets down to the number of reads versus the number of writes. A highly read-only db is a lot easier to run with many users. However when you have a lot of reads and writes happening simulataneously, the requirements spiral upwards.

Regards...jmcc

forbairt

eth0_ wrote:

8TB of data.....for $400 dollars?
Do you have a url for that?

My link to another thread .. on setting up a youtube style site ... was quoting 1gb at 1dollar ... that was for streaming video content ...

I also have a rough calculation in that thread .. which was showing bandwidth usage of 2TB for 1 video ... that was 1 minute long ... and had 250000 views ...

AARRRGH

eth0_ wrote:

8TB of data.....for $400 dollars?
Do you have a url for that?

Sure

From the first post in the link to webhostingtalk I posted earlier -

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=637884

Intel Pentium 4 2.8Ghz
1024MB Memory
160GB Primary Hard Drive
5 IP's, 3300GB Bandwidth, 10mbps Port
10mbps Unmetered (3300gb)
$119 per month with $0 setup fee

That's 10 TB for $357 per month.

You can reduce that to 8 TB and up the price to $400 and find yourself some nice dual core servers

jmcc

AnCatDubh wrote:

hmnnn.... the same mickey mouse MySQL that boards.ie runs on

No. Read what I wrote again. I said 'a mickey mouse MySQL db'. The size of the average small brochureware site db would be only a few hundred KB or a few MB at most. The boards.ie db would be probably in the GB range. MySQL is good db software for many things and it is fast. But once you get beyond medium databases, the servers and the hardware play an increasingly more important part.

It just happens that i caught sight of a commercial proposal for doing just such a thing this afternoon - the set up fees quoted are typically between €12k - €15k and service fees are charged out on a per 1000 users basis at approx €3k per qtr.

And 1000 goes into 1,000,000 how many times?

Regards...jmcc

AARRRGH

jmcc wrote:

However when you have a lot of reads and writes happening simulataneously, the requirements spiral upwards.

Regards...jmcc

Fair enough. However I think my point still stands - high spec dedicated servers are cheap nowadays, and it doesn't cost much to have lots of them

AnCatDubh

jmcc wrote:

And 1000 goes into 1,000,000 how many times?

Aha - i know the answer to this one. About as many times as €3,000 goes into €3,000,000 - Ok. you could be broke on this fairly rapidly - I did say it was a commercial proposal. :rolleyes:

Cheers,

squibs

2K for the development fee seems way too low. 12-15 + maintenance fees as quoted above seems more like it.

jmcc

dublindude wrote:

Fair enough. However I think my point still stands - high spec dedicated servers are cheap nowadays, and it doesn't cost much to have lots of them

A high spec database server has a lot more RAM, at least a RAID harddisc array and a high end CPU (ideally multi-core). They are a bit more expensive than the usual dedicated servers. Though that's moving towards the top-end spec. Most sites do not need that kind of sheer horsepower for their db work.

Regards...jmcc

WPI20000

Think of the crazy long list of expenses involved. Design, hosting, editing, etc. The annual costs would be €10,000+.

steve-hosting36

Even a relatively modest site like that would be 15-25k to design and develop and you are looking at from 1k to 25k per month for the hosting / infrastructure. How long is a piece of string really...

WPI20000

steve-hosting36 wrote:

Even a relatively modest site like that would be 15-25k to design and develop and you are looking at from 1k to 25k per month for the hosting / infrastructure. How long is a piece of string really...

Don't know who you use for hosting, but 25k is nuts! Our guys charge us somehting like €3.95 per month.

steve-hosting36

rofl - shared hosting and real Enterprise/Carrier grade solutions are very different things. We have customers paying us over 30k per month for solutions.

mneylon

steve-hosting36 wrote:

rofl - shared hosting and real Enterprise/Carrier grade solutions are very different things. We have customers paying us over 30k per month for solutions.

Damn. I'm going to have to agree with you in public again, aren't I?

grahamor

WPI20000 wrote:

Our guys charge us somehting like €3.95 per month.

And do you really think your 3.95 hosting could handle the bandwidth required for a bebo like site ? get real !

Have a look at the other posts about hosting and bandwidth to see what they are on about.

grahamor

steve-hosting36 wrote:

We have customers paying us over 30k per month for solutions.

Can you tell us who it is ? or even what business they are in ?

steve-hosting36

Afraid not, although I can tell you the solution involves 18 dual, dual core server, all with 8gb ram and a fibre channel SAN (among other things).

We would have more than 40 customers in the 10k per month plus bracket for hosting - it's surprisingly difficult (and correspondingly expensive) to do scalable hosting solutions well.

mneylon

When you start dealing with scale and reliability the costs go up and up.

Most of the really big sites use really big database engines (eg. Oracle). The licensing and maintenance costs on the database software alone is BIG (Check out how much an Oracle DBA earns to see what I mean)