Industry-standard hosting costs for 100m page views per year
August 4, 2014 10:13 AM Subscribe
I'm looking for hosting costs data that I can present to management. This is for 3 Drupal-based sites which each get approximately 100 million page views per year.
As traffic to our sites rises, costs are also rising and I need to be able to demonstrate that we're paying a comparable amount for hosting / support to other sites with similar needs. Ideally, management will be most impressed by documents or pages I can link them to, rather than 'someone on Metafilter said'.
I appreciate that this depends to a large extent on the details of the sites and their implementation, but remember this is just to reassure the bosses, so it doesn't have to be perfect.
We use an agency who specialise in Drupal hosting and use Varnish, a CDN etc. to reduce the load. We put this contract out to tender every few years, but there are still year-on-year increases due to better-than-expected traffic on the sites.
Finally, if there's somewhere else I can ask this question and find expert answers, I'd be happy to hear about it.
As traffic to our sites rises, costs are also rising and I need to be able to demonstrate that we're paying a comparable amount for hosting / support to other sites with similar needs. Ideally, management will be most impressed by documents or pages I can link them to, rather than 'someone on Metafilter said'.
I appreciate that this depends to a large extent on the details of the sites and their implementation, but remember this is just to reassure the bosses, so it doesn't have to be perfect.
We use an agency who specialise in Drupal hosting and use Varnish, a CDN etc. to reduce the load. We put this contract out to tender every few years, but there are still year-on-year increases due to better-than-expected traffic on the sites.
Finally, if there's somewhere else I can ask this question and find expert answers, I'd be happy to hear about it.
Response by poster: Good questions. Traffic is (very) globally distributed. I'd say traffic is fairly steady, but I'm not sure what's normal in that regard - GAnalytics is showing me between 3.5k and 5.5k sessions per hour, with daily variations showing a relatively similar range.
posted by Busy Old Fool at 10:36 AM on August 4, 2014
posted by Busy Old Fool at 10:36 AM on August 4, 2014
I do more traffic than that for about $500 a month. Total.
Plus a little extra for CDN, which is pay-as-you-go, and doesn't get used much.
posted by RJ Reynolds at 10:59 AM on August 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
Plus a little extra for CDN, which is pay-as-you-go, and doesn't get used much.
posted by RJ Reynolds at 10:59 AM on August 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
A large part of hosting costs is how much work you're doing.
Is this completely managed hosting? Or are you doing any sort of support?
posted by bitdamaged at 1:45 PM on August 4, 2014
Is this completely managed hosting? Or are you doing any sort of support?
posted by bitdamaged at 1:45 PM on August 4, 2014
How much of the traffic is authenticated users vs. anonymous? This greatly affects the processing requirement on Drupal sites.
Do you have any information on what hardware it is currently being hosted on?
posted by Gomez_in_the_South at 5:43 PM on August 4, 2014
Do you have any information on what hardware it is currently being hosted on?
posted by Gomez_in_the_South at 5:43 PM on August 4, 2014
Best answer: Busy Old Fool, I just sent you a memail with some data points.
posted by kovacs at 6:58 PM on August 4, 2014
posted by kovacs at 6:58 PM on August 4, 2014
Response by poster: Is this completely managed hosting? Or are you doing any sort of support?
It's pretty much completely managed.
How much of the traffic is authenticated users vs. anonymous? This greatly affects the processing requirement on Drupal sites.
About 5% is authenticated. Anonymous users see the CDN.
Do you have any information on what hardware it is currently being hosted on?
AWS - 2 m1.mediums for Varnish, 2 m3.xlarge for web, 2 m1.mediums for Gluster and 1 db.m2.xlarge. Plus staging servers and some other bits and pieces.
We need to transfer up to 7TB per month, fwiw.
posted by Busy Old Fool at 7:40 AM on August 5, 2014
It's pretty much completely managed.
How much of the traffic is authenticated users vs. anonymous? This greatly affects the processing requirement on Drupal sites.
About 5% is authenticated. Anonymous users see the CDN.
Do you have any information on what hardware it is currently being hosted on?
AWS - 2 m1.mediums for Varnish, 2 m3.xlarge for web, 2 m1.mediums for Gluster and 1 db.m2.xlarge. Plus staging servers and some other bits and pieces.
We need to transfer up to 7TB per month, fwiw.
posted by Busy Old Fool at 7:40 AM on August 5, 2014
« Older Steps for purchasing a used car? | When do I tell someone I just started dating that... Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by michaelh at 10:23 AM on August 4, 2014