Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 7 years ago.
Improve this question
I re-designed a few sites for a marketing & events company, and they are asking me to spear-head a host change because they don't like their current host, so they pay very little.
They have:
Five static sites (total of about 3GBs of disk space)
All five sites probably get 20,000+ visitors a month.
They currently pay $10 a month for shared hosting.
They have about 15 active e-mail addresses.
Their servers always go down, and their email always goes down.
They want to switch hosting and are looking into www.hostgator.com . They want to effectively pay the same yet get better results. I have recommended better hosting locally in Toronto that would cost about $50 a month, but with a very reputable company.
As I mainly deal with front-end design, I'm not sure how to best explain to them their best option. Should an established company use cheap ($10/month) hosting? Or is this asking for trouble? Should I politely explain that a company with 15 employees needs to invest more than $100 a year in their web presence?
That is a very low amount of visitors so any host should handle it, and space should not be a concern either. I agree they should invest more but it depends on how critical the sites are to their business, or whether they ARE the business.
It sounds like the current host is unreliable but you can find another host that has more reliability. 1and1, godaddy, ipower are 3 that come to mind and all typically under $100/year but I believe that is per-domain so they might still have to pay about the $50/month you are recommending for the 5 sites.
SEE: lf=Static&linkOrigin=&linkId=hd.subnav.linuxhosting">http://www.1and1.com/linux-web-hosting?_lf=Static&linkOrigin=&linkId=hd.subnav.linuxhosting
SEE: http://www.ipower.com/ipower/web-hosting/unix-compare-plans.bml
SEE: http://www.godaddy.com/products/websites-hosting.aspx?ci=72738
Your question about established company using cheap hosting: sure they can and if the host is not reliable they can find a better one and still stay cheap.
Your question about explaining they need to invest more: that depends on how critical the sites are to their business and their needs. If just brochureware about their company, and not their actual product, it might be acceptable to them. If their product is a web application and they are expected to be reliable for their customers, definitely have the talk. They can get a dedicated server with control panel to manage all their domains, email, etc. for less than $150/month, or leverage the 24/7 support of the vendors I mentioned above.
20000 visitors a month is only about 27 visitors an hour, or 1 every 2 minutes or so. That's a pretty light load, unless you're doing some real heavy-duty server-side processing.
As far as the user load goes, I think the basic shared hosting setup is probably sufficient. As an example, Go Daddy's setup is like $7.00 a month (US) and is pretty reliable. I've got a few clients hosting their sites there and we've had very few problems. I've also heard pretty good things about HostGator and their prices are similar.
If you want to go to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) setup, you don't need to spend $100/month. They start off at about $20.00 or so a month for a relatively basic setup, and go up from there depending on things like RAM and disk space.
The biggest advantage to a VPS might be the flexibility to install whatever additional software you want, something you can't do with most shared hosting setups.
The answer depends on the type of site they're running, or more precisely, how much money they gain by having a web presence.
If they're running a basic site that says who they are, what they do, and how to contact them, then they probably don't need decent hosting. 20k visits per month isn't much, so it's certainly not worth spending a lot of money on. In fact, you're probably better off spending the money on getting a nice professional redesign every 2-3 years or so, to keep the company image up to date.
If they're running an e-commerce site, where some of their orders come directly from their site, they should definitely invest more in their hosting. Keep in mind that for every hit that occurs during hosting downtime, you lose a potential customer. Paying $50 per month for hosting is good value for money if you're making $100 per month or more from online orders, which I hope would be the case for a successful business.
If they're looking to gain a bigger online audience, perhaps you should convince them to spend some money on an SEO campaign, and set aside money for the extra hits when your current hosting plan can't cope with the load.
Related
Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 5 years ago.
Improve this question
I'm trying to work in a more organised way and started adopting user stories.
I think I have misunderstanding of how should I use user stories for technical stuff.
Let's say I'm coding an app that gives me the ranking of my site for a certain Keyword in Google.
The user story goes like that:
As an Internet Marketer
I want to find out where my website ranks for a keyword
So I'll know whether my SEO efforts work
Now this is pretty straight forward and user centric... However, what happens if I need to introduce Proxies into the loop.
On one hand, Proxies are technical implementation detail on the other hand, proxies is part of the Internet Marketer's domain.
How should I craft such story?
As an Internet Marketer
I want to use Proxies when searching in Google
So we'll be able to check a lot of keywords without Google blocking us
The above scenario doesn't sound right for me... Maybe I can rewrite it to be something like:
As an Internet Marketer
I want to be able to check a lot of Keywords at a time
So it'll save me time
This sounds more right, however what acceptance criteria can I give it? try scraping google 100 times in a min? Isn't it waste of time?
Here's another scenario. How should I craft a user story when the feature I want to implement is that a proxy can be used once in 30 seconds? I don't have any idea of how to approach this problem from a user centric perspective...
Another thing I thought of doing is to present another Role. Instead of being centered around Internet Marketer, I can say we have a role called Google Scraper. I can say that Internet Marketer is in relation with Google Scraper.
Now I can write a user story like:
As Google Scraper
I want to change proxies every Search
So Google won't ban me
What would you say about approaching technical implementation details like above? It can also help breaking the system down into modules...
You don't write technical stories. User stories should meet the INVEST criteria.
Proxies do sound like an implementation detail and should be avoided. You should not be mentioning proxy servers in your story. Even if they are part of the domain, there are potentially other ways to achieve the same effect.
Instead of writing "I want to use a Proxy, so that I don't get blocked", you should write, "I want to disguise my identity, so that I don't get blocked". If I was your customer, I wouldn't know why you wanted a proxy? Is it a forward, open or reverse proxy? There are loads of uses for a proxy server. You should pick the feature that you want to exploit.
However, you shouldn't get too hung up on perfect stories. The agile manifesto says, "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools".
When writing a user story, you should also consider the 3 C's: Card, Conversation, Confirmation. Do both the customer and you understand the meaning of the story?
Does the card meet INVEST criteria? If you answered yes to both those questions then the story is fine.
User Stories should not include technical details. During Sprint Planing technical details should be added as Delivery Team tasks nested below the User Story. These tasks should be created through discussion by the delivery team. You should not attempt to document every implementation detail under the sun as you will reach a point of diminishing return. Aim for 60-75 percent coverage on implementation details (tasks) for each user story as the details may change as coding begins. Any additional details developer discover during coding can be shared and documented briefly during the daily stand-up. should The User Story can be simple and non-technical while the Delivery / Development Team will flesh out story details as nested Tasks.
These Task should be visible to Developers through their Integrated Development Environment (IDE). As Developers complete tasks they can associate their checked in code with the task in your work item tracking tool (Jira, Team Foundation Server, On-Time)
Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.
Closed 9 years ago.
Improve this question
We are planning to introduce real time chat feature in our mobile apps. Ofcourse we would be going the XMPP way.
Can anybody shed some light on stats for maximum number of concurrent users Openfire has supported on EC2 instances (windows server) of different sizes in the real world?
We are looking at numbers ranging from 22500 concurrent users to 75000 concurrent users depending upon growth patterns predicted for app downloads and user adaptability for this new real time chat feature. time range = next 12 months.
From whatever googling I have done so far, it seems Openfire may not be the best bet when it comes to scaling out so can these numbers be supported on a single instance of ec2 over time? ie: we start hosting on smaller instances and keep increasing instance size as load demands.
Ejabbered seemed to be the best option when it comes to scaling out but since we would need to have erlang skills in order to extend it makes ejabbered a difficult choice for us. The other alternate is tigase which is java so we could extend it much easily but if Openfire can work for us for the next 12 months or so by scaling up versus scaling out, we would be happy to use it for now and see how well this new chat feature is embraced. Number one reason being ease of management.
Lastly, if you could help with links on SaaS / PaaS providers for XMPP chat + Push Notifications to mobile devices when user is offline, it would be awesome. We got in touch with quickblox.com but their enterprise offerings appear to be expensive for us at the moment. We want 100% ownership and portability of our data if we go the SaaS / PaaS way.
There are several references to Openfire handling those and larger numbers of concurrent users on a single server.
There is document on scalability from 2007 that shows 50000 users supported on version 3.2. The current release is 3.7.1. Don't forget that that also means a much slower machine than anything you are likely to run on today.
You also have to take into account what features of XMPP you will be using, but simple messaging should be able to easily handle the numbers you are referring to.
The numbers you mention should be easily handled by ejabberd.
I am unsure as to how you want to "extend" ejabberd. Multi-user chat and messaging are handled fine by all servers and of course ejabberd. Additionally, if you are thinking of custom protocols, these can be written in your language of choice and connect to ejabberd as an XMPP component.
The only thing you might miss is a web interface (which ejabberd has but it's rather limited), but then again if you expect to manage things through a web UI for an application, you will need to think again ;)
if you want to go with ejabberd, you can always get support from ProcessOne.
This is another plus for ejabberd, as it can be commercially supported if you want to / can afford.
Android Push Notification is a good solution.
With Android-Push services, you (Android developers) can send messages directly to the people who have installed your app. All you need is to include a code snippet into your app, and post to a specific URL to reach your app users, even if your app is inactive on their phone.
Feature:
Free
Free, unless you need extensive number of pushes for your app. Of course you can pay for more push and a quicker tech support.
Easy
Extremely easy to integrate into your app
Super simple to push to the app: just send a URL request
No C2DM limit, you don't have to have a gmail account to use the push service
Cloud service, no need to setup your own push server
Effective
Low battery and network consumption on the phone
Track user interaction, find out how users react to your push
Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.
Closed 11 years ago.
Improve this question
I have been doing webdesign for a small business in Denmark, which alrady have a deal with a larger company to create the final site.
Among this companys proposal, I see that they charge a rather large fee for installing Magento on my clients server, and an additional fee to integrate the design.
Same company forbids my client from having FTP or similar access to the server, and they are therefornot able to install this themselves.
My question is : is resale of the Magento really allowed by the licence? This company wants to charge a rather steep amout for even installing a blank version of it, no Magento-licencing included.
Ihave looked larger company up, and this company does NOT have a standing licence for Magento. And even if they got one, I have a sneeky feeling that something is legal/licence wrong here.
The reason I share this with you is that I have a guts feeling that I should raise some critical questions and suggest that My client uses another company for their webaite, but I need to be certain that Im on the right side.
The IT company has no partnership with Magento/Varien, and have a somewhat tarnished reputation already...
I have mailed Magento about this, but have not had any response yet.
Your question is not entirely clear. But a company can certainly charge for installing a licensed product on behalf of the licencee, this is just a consulting or service fee (unless the licence specifically prohibits a third party from doing this, which is possible (although unlikely) if a) source code is being exposed, or b) there are other commercial sensitivities such as NDAs. But then that is not your risk, it's the licensee's)
As for Ubuntu, a company can again charge for installing or maintaining an Ubuntu install, again this is consulting/service. In fact you can SELL a copy of Ubuntu too, if someone is willing to pay for it that is their perogative (and they in turn can sell it themselves). You just have to provide the source and the licence, not just a compiled binary in order to comply with the GPL.
I can understand the position of the 'large company' providing the managed hosting for the Magento build. However, I also understand your concerns.
Assuming that you are only working on the design, there is no reason why you cannot implement your design on localhost with the Magento 'demo store' products. You can then take your design along to the 'small company', get your designs signed off, archive the /skin/frontend/default/macguffin and /app/design/frontend/default/macguffin folders, hand them over to the company providing the 'managed hosting' and then collect your pay-cheque.
By not allowing you access via FTP the 'managed hosting' provider are ensuring that their clients have no third-parties able to access any-of-their-stuff. Furthermore, design is not that big a deal in a Magento build, there is also the payment gateway, the shipping setup, analytics and everything else that happens on go-live. They are also taking the responsibility of providing uptime, availability and the aforementioned security.
You and I know that you can do all of that on a virtual-private-server and get it done in a matter of days, with lots of testing but no client liaison meetings, office overheads to pay for, an expensive project manager to explain everything to, excessive time-sheeting to keep up to date and so on.
However, the 'small company' will have reservations on allowing someone other than the 'large company' doing all of that. Given that their web presence is pivotal to the success of their business, given that they may not have management resources, given the fear of the unknown, given a lack of in-house expertise, politically the solution they have arrived at can be considered as making business sense to them.
There is nothing wrong with the business arrangement from a legal/licensing point of view. From your point of view of getting the job done, you can do your design offline, i.e. on localhost, deliver the deliverables and collect your cheque.
If the deal with the 'large company' does not work out then, if your work is good, you will be well placed to take on the project, to charge 'freelancer' rather than 'agency' rates and build a long term relationship with the 'small company'. However, you are not there yet, your best bet is to forge a close working relationship with the 'small company' and the 'large company'. For all you know, the 'large company' may have other clients, and, if you work well with them (i.e. drop the suspicions and animosity-from-the-outset), then you will possibly get other design work from their other clients.
Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.
Closed 12 years ago.
Improve this question
Hi I want to develop my own hosting site but i do not know how should i get hosting names ??
How these hosting companies get these domain names ????
Here's the ICANN Accreditation Overview.
Some notes I got from another website (disclaimer: may be out of date)
You need a $500,000 liability policy
(around $5k USD per annum)
$70,000 liquid funds
$2,500 application fee
$4,000 annual accreditation fee
An alternative and cheaper route is finding a reseller, but you will have to pass some serious volume to make any meaningful amount of money.
Find a better niche.
Domain names must be purchased from a domain name registrar. Hosting companies are often resellers for registrars.
Many hosting companies and registrars offer easy-to-use reseller or affiliate programs - they will typically include lots of information on their website. This is by far the best way to get into selling hosting and domain names, as they will take care of the technical side of things. If you have a unique way of selling hosting, this can be quite profitable, but beware of trying to sell online, as this market is extremely crowded and competative already.
Not sure I understand what you're asking, but if you mean to say that you want to start a business hosting other folks's web sites, then you let your customers worry about getting their own domain names. It is nevertheless possible for you to become a domain-name registrar and add that to your business model.
Although I have to say that this is not a typical Stackoverflow question (supposed to be programming questions here). I think this question fits better on ServerFault, and would probably get better answers. You should make the question clearer, though.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 4 years ago.
Improve this question
I work for a medium sized software company and have been put to the task of finding a new way of electronically distributing our software. We don't have a super fast connection to distribute it ourselves so it would need to be a solution that we can upload to and send out links to customers. The customers won't be purchasing our software from our website as we already do most of our sales from direct sales and partner sales. Since I joined the company we have grown from CD distribution sized downloads to DVD sized distribution downloads. We released a new version and find the YouSendIT Service to be clunky and 99% of our customers receive a link to download the software. We only send out a printed media if requested. Is there a service besides yousendit that allows for unlimited file size uploads/downloads. I have heard of drop.io and it seemed to be similar to yousendit. If you could please point me in the direction of Electronic software distribution system that is 3rd party hosted would be appreciated.
Thanks
Mike
You should look into Content Delivery Networks, such as Amazon CloudFront.
You might want to reconsider the way you are going about this.
If you software is open source, you should be using sourceforge. Otherwise you should just get a cheap hosting plan with lots of transfer bandwidth.
For example, godaddy has an unlimited account (unlimited transfer, unlimited space) for about $14.95 per month.
You point a sub domain i.e. download.rivageek.com to that server. This gives your users confidence when they download your application.
If they have to go to some ad laden 3rd party site they might think twice about giving you money. If you lose only 1 customer to that, it pays for itself (assuming you charge more than 14.95 for your product).
The fine print on many of those 3rd party sites mean they own whatever you upload as well.
If you'd like something that allows (simplisticly) secure one-time downloads, I've used filehosting.org in the past. They give you a hashed link to the software when you upload it, which you can then email to anybody you want to be able to download the file. If you want, you can set it to delete the file after one download.
In response to using your own domain for the downloads, it's possible to configure both Amazon S3 and CloudFront to use a custom domain name. Here are the instructions for S3 -- very straight forward:
http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/latest/index.html?VirtualHosting.html
If emailing out a direct link to your distribution file (zip, etc.) is sufficient, I'd say go with one of these services -- they're very cost effective, reliable, and easy to set up.
You could use a filehosting service or get a regular web host with unlimited bandwidth just avoid Godaddy as its shared hosting is overcrowded and overbooked. (personal experience)