Just doing my monthly rec for The Inquisitr in costs, and discover that our full hosting bill (including host, third party storage and CDN) should come in at about US$220 this month.
That’s with 331gb through Amazon Cloudfront (I also use S3 for storage, a different service, doesn’t cost much at all for storage so not counted here), 33gb through Limelight Networks (I mention both names because they are both considered worlds best) and 120gb of bandwith through Rackspace (again considered to be a top tier host.)
People want to argue about the economics of journalism in the case of New Matilda: fine. But you know I’m right when I say New Matilda blaming increased hosting costs as one of their reasons for shutting either indicates a falsehood, or what I suspect is the case: they were doing it wrong.
I’m far, far from an expert in hosting: our last bill before leaving MediaTemple last year was something over US$1k for example (on one third of the traffic), and keeping the bloody thing up was an ongoing nightmare. But I’ve found that you can always cut hosting costs if you look around and do your homework properly, and I’d note most importantly: you don’t have to sacrifice quality either. In fact, we’ve got far better quality hosting then we ever have had. We’ve had few to no problems with our current setup, and the use of CDN’s has increased site loading times significantly.
My guess is New Matilda didn’t have a CDN and were probably using a local host who was charging them an arm and a leg.
Edit: just changed the reference to S3. I use both Cloudfront and S3. The bill comes from Cloudfront. S3 was like $3 this month.
