Cost for website?

[rogwar]

The hosting and maintenance charges for our fishing club website are going to be $20/month. Does that sound about right?

http://www.crappieclub.org/

[DiabloTX]

What a crappie website...





j/k, have no idea about your question.

[68ROX]

Originally posted by rogwar
The hosting and maintenance charges for our fishing club website are going to be $20/month. Does that sound about right?

http://www.crappieclub.org/

Yes....depending on how much space you are getting in total.


68ROX

[KONG1]

You can get 5 Gig Space, 250 Gig transfer for around $4 per month. Probably enough.

You can get 100 Gig Space, 1000 Gig transfer for around $7 per month.

You can get 200 Gig space, 2000 gig transfer for around $15 per month.

That's just hosting with some pretty good tech support. You also specified maintenance, don't know what your getting there so don't know what it's worth. If you're getting say 5 hours a year of site modification by a professional web designer then that sounds about right.

It's been developed using the dotnetnuke open source framework which I suppose is ok (no experience) but the design seems very much on the amateur side. Best I can do without more details.

[lasersailor184]

What about Domain costs?

[rabbidrabbit]

I'd like to join but that club doesn't sound so great.

[forHIM]

Kong, nailed it.

It depends on how that 20/month is broken down.  If it is just the hosting cost, then you have a problem.  If it is the hosting cost + someone's time to do the editing, look and feel formating, etc., then it is a good deal.

As an example, the ahevents.org site is at hostmonster.com for a $6/month hosting rate.  It uses an open source content management system so the CMs can edit and maintain the content.  The other maintenance is just applying security fixes and building tools for the CMs to use and I do that on a volunteer basis.

Bluehost, hostmonster and fastdomains are all owned by the same person and offer the same basic services for a 5 to 7/month fee for a 2 year commitment.

For the 20/month I'd make sure its serving the geography that you want well.  From my system, the home page took a very long time to load, but subsequent pages were ok.  If your members complain about time to load or slow loading images, I'd check to see if you ISP is out of bandwidth or if the server your on is oversubscribed.

[JB88]

Originally posted by rogwar
The hosting and maintenance charges for our fishing club website are going to be $20/month. Does that sound about right?

http://www.crappieclub.org/

the above post is correct.

too much for hosting alone.

[rabbidrabbit]

Why not just host it at home....  should not be too much work... DNS point, install web server... tada!

[forHIM]

Originally posted by rabbidrabbit
Why not just host it at home....  should not be too much work... DNS point, install web server... tada!

It is doable, but the question is bandwidth.  Remember most american's connections to the internet is asymmetric.  Your cable or DSL download speed is through the roof, but your upload is usually pathetic.  For example, charter is typically 5 Mb down and 128 Kb up.  It doesn't take too many connections to use up that upload link (which is what your own web server would be using).

Also, using a dyndns service or even a static dns typically subjects you to more probes, scans, and in general more security risk/scans against your firewall.  Also, allowing inbound traffic through your packet router/firewall gives another opportunity for a malicious person to do bad things.

Third item, while you may think your connection is 7x24 it is not guaranteed and most likely there are small outages each and every day that may cause you to have problems with hosting a web server out of your house.

[rabbidrabbit]

True enough but if you are just a fishing club with a few dozen members its not much of a problem at all.  Pulling an average page is what ?  about 100k with a pict of two?  It will be just fine as long as the site design is intelligent.

[forHIM]

True.  I was also thinking that their aspirations are to grow it and due to the active schedule of tournaments, this could be a site that has a couple of hundred members by mid-year.  If they plan on being more active in promoting their news / tournament news, then a home hosted site may not be good.


The member ship fee is $20 per person just to be in the club, so I'm not sure what their board of directors is planning to do with that.  As a person on the outside, looking in, I can't see what the $20 is for, but then again I'm on the outside, so I don't know if the site login unlocks the secrets of catching trophy crappie's in Texas or if its to pay for the treats at the monthly seminars

[LePaul]

I use http://www.webhost4life.com

I think they have a basic $9 a month plan (you pay for the year up front tho)

[rogwar]

Thanks for all the input so far. At this point we have about a hundred paid members since starting in November, so we have some funding. The website was created and the hosting offered by a member that works with such things.

Yeah one of us could host it but there may be bandwidth issues in the future and besides the time issue.

I'm the acting secretary/treasurer so just am wanting to make sure it's a fair price. On the surface it does seem a little expensive. However, I've not met the person that is offering the service but will at the meeting on Thursday. I'll be in a better position now to discuss the service and what is included.

The dues go to pay for meeting venues and things like this website. It also is used to invest in tourney prizes. We have pro staff folks as members so they get to promote their equipment as well as pass along expert knowledge. We have sponsors and will be adding them as well.

Here is a north Texas catfishing club website that is a little further along as reference....

http://www.northtexastrophycats.com/index_files/Page387.htm

[forHIM]

Rogwar,

The site appears to be already hosted at WebHost4Life the one LePaul referred to.  The cost through them should be 5 or 10 / month plus the 6.95 domain registration fee.  So for the annual cost it should be 4.95 x 12 or 9.95 x 12 + 6.95 for the domain name.