Web/Database hosting costs can go higher if you want own your servers and maintain them . This article will tell you about Web hosting expenses startup.
The biggest advantage of building a web startup is that you don’t need big seed investment to kickstart things. If you’re the leading technology guy of your startup, the expense on product building is next to Nil as it doesn’t take brick and mortar to build a website or turn your idea into a working alpha prototype. All it takes as an investment is ‘Intellectual capital’ and ‘Time’ of the individuals involved.
The next accountable expense that fluctuates over a wide range is Web hosting expenses. There are businesses that prefer procuring and maintaining their own servers. Timely upgrades, software licensing, dedicated manpower etc are among add-on liabilities that come with self-managed servers.
Web/Database hosting costs can go pretty high if you really want to own your servers and maintain them in your own premises. But that’s not the requirement for any startup that has just taken off. Most web startups(99.9%) are far from attracting traffic levels which are unbearable for standalone hosting service providers.
Hosting providers serve all kinds of hosting needs, whether ‘shared hosting‘ for low traffic websites or ‘dedicated hosting‘ for high traffic startups. As web hosting market is turning pretty competitive, some of the best web hosting companies are now amongst the cheapest web hosting providers as well. For finding cheapest hosting providers on web, stumble over some hosting reviews of various service providers (such as this one for the Web hosting hub) and choose the one that suits your budget and needs. Remember that shared hosting is not ideal for high traffic websites and one should immediately upgrade to dedicated hosting plans once the website starts attracting big traffic spikes more often.
Apart from regular hosting service providers, yet another way to accommodate web hosting needs for cloud hosted web apps is services like Amazon EC2. EC2 allows scalable deployment of web apps and users are billed according to variation in traffic levels. In other words, the users will only pay for the bandwidth consumed by the traffic their web app attracts, rather than paying some fixed rental which may not be as cost-effective to the users.
There are other hosting options such as App Engine, more suited to hosting enterprise applications. Looking at current trends, Cloud computing based options is picking up fast. And as you explore more, you will realize more such options catering to different needs. That’s all for now about hosting for small & medium sized web startups.