Why does it cost $1000 to keep PixelScrapper.com running?

At the current rate of downloads and growth, the cost to keep PixelScrapper.com up and running during 2011 is going to be around $1000. Some of you may run blogs or personal websites, and I'm guessing (hoping!) that you probably don't pay nearly that much to host your site... consequently you may understandably be a bit skeptical about the cost of running PixelScrapper. So on this page I'll do my best to explain why my bills are so high (hopefully without getting too technical!).

For those who want the brief version:

In Brief

• Shared hosting (which most people use to host their blogs and personal websites) only costs a few dollars per month, but PixelScrapper has too many resource requirements for shared hosting, so I have to pay $37.5 per month for a Virtual Private Server. This will likely rise to $50 over the course of the year.
• Hosting a lot of large files on a virtual private server is very expensive, so I host my files with a dedicated file hosting company, and pay a small fee every time someone downloads a file. This Bandwidth Cost costs me $25 per month. This will likely rise to $40 over the course of the year.

For those of you who want more detail:

Shared Hosting vs. Virtual Private Servers

The most basic cost involved in running a website is the cost of hosting the site. Every website is made up of html files and whatnot that have to live somewhere on the internet. More specifically, they have to live on a hard drive on a computer called a server, located at a data center with high bandwidth. The company that manages these data centers is called a web host company. So the web host has lots of computers in a building, serving websites to people who browse the web. For a small fee, the web host will give you access to some space on one of their computers, where you can host your website: using FTP you upload your website's files to the web host, and voila: your blog or photo gallery comes to life online!

If you search around online (or have a blog or personal website running already) you'll find that there are a lot of web hosts out there, most of them offering to host your website for $5 or $6 a month. The catch, however, is that these rates are for shared hosting environments. Remember all those computers sitting at the web host's data center, serving websites to people browsing the internet? A shared hosting environment means that you share one of those computers with other customers. Typically 100 to 500 other customers. That means that one computer's hard drive space, and (more importantly) RAM and processor cycles will be split between all those hundreds of people's websites. For small personal sites and blogs this generally isn't a problem: the sites hosted on any given computer are relatively small, with modest processing requirements, and a low number of visitors (though even for personal sites, shared hosting environments can often mean that the site loads a bit slowly, and goes offline somewhat frequently). I know all of this because I have used shared hosting extensively in the past for various personal sites that I've run (and have had good experiences with some hosts).

For large dynamic sites with lots of memory and processing requirements, however, shared hosting isn't an option. Do you notice all the images you see on PixelScrapper, all resized to different thumbnail dimensions? That resizing happens automatically on the host computer, and is an example of something that requires lots of RAM and processing power... far more than a shared host is willing to provide.

So for PixelScrapper.com I need something called a Virtual Private Server: which is basically like having my own computer at the data center, so that I don't have to share resources with all those other websites that are hosted on the same computer. Instead, I pay more, and get a certain amount of dedicated memory and processing power. After doing a lot of research, I decided to use Linode.com to host PixelScrapper, and am currently paying $30 per month for a "Linode 768" configuration, as well as $7.5 per month for backup services. Based on site growth, that figure will probably rise to $40 (plus $10 for backup) during the course of 2011. That's $600 per year.

File hosting and bandwidth

Besides the hosting and backup fees, I also pay Bandwidth Fees every time a file is downloaded from PixelScrapper.com. Getting large amounts of hard drive space on a virtual private server is very expensive, so instead of hosting all my scrapbooking templates and psd files with Linode.com, I host them with another company (Amazon Web Services) that specializes in File Hosting. Instead of charging me a constant monthly rate, they just charge me a small fee every time a file is downloaded. These fees are currently running at $25 per month, and are likely to rise to $40 per month during the course of 2011. That's $480 per year.

There are some companies online that will host files for free, but they tend to be slow, unreliable, and a headache to use. Have you ever tried to download a nice digital freebie only to be taken to a page where you had to wait for 45 seconds before proceeding, then enter a captcha code before your download would start, all while being bombarded with advertisements? I want your experience at PixelScrapper to be better than that.

Domain name fees

There is also a small $10 annual fee that I have to pay to my registrar every year to maintain ownership of my domain name, PixelScrapper.com.

Adding it up

So if you put all the fees together you can see that it currently costs me $37.5 + $25 + $1 = $63 per month to run PixelScrapper, and that that figure will probably rise to $50 + $40 + $1 = $91 by the end of the year (that's being conservative)... or about $1000 for the year.