Brno BVE Website donation system finished

Reading your information page and the cost comments of other devs, I'm beginning to wonder, whether hosting is incredibly cheap in Germany or my company is that cheap...

The park railway homepage I administrate and use for my own PHP scripts is hosted at STRATO. There are the following basic modes:

BasicWeb: 9.90€ setup fee, first 6 months 0€, then 1.99€ per month, at least 12 months (that's 1.82€ per month in the first year or 1.90€ per month in the first two). 200MB webspace, 1 domain inclusive, FTP access, unlimited traffic, no subdomains, 25 e-mail addresses (2GB inbox each).

BasicWeb L: 9.90€ setup fee, first 6 months 0€, then 2.99€ per month, at least 12 months (that's 2.32€ per month in the first year or 2.65€ per month in the first two). 500MB webspace, 2 domains inclusive, FTP access, unlimited traffic, 10 subdomains, 50 e-mail addresses (2GB inbox each).

BasicWeb XL (that's the one we use): 9.90€ setup fee, first 12 months 0€, then 4.99€ per month, at least 24 months (that's 4.15€ per month in the first two years). 1GB webspace, 3 domains inclusive, FTP access, unlimited traffic, 100 subdomains, 150 e-mail addresses (2GB inbox each).

The last one is most similar to the one you list as variant three of your hoster. Or the other way round; variant three of your hoster costs about 16€ per month. For that you'd get the highest quality offer my hoster has to offer, the PowerWeb Premium set (13.69€ per month in the first year or 19.29€ per month in the first two: Setup fee 14.90€, first six months free, then 24.90€ per month, minimum 12 months) with 20GB webspace, 12 domains inclusive, multiuser FTP access (50 users), unlimited traffic, 2500 subdomains, 2500 e-mail addresses (2GB inbox each)...

Maybe you should consider outsourcing

My web host is the cheapest.... It's me

I have an old Dell machine from a few years ago (the type used in schools and colleges) running Ubuntu server. All I need pay for is a domain, and the marginal electricity cost (it's amazing how little power it uses with no graphical interface). Only downside is the speed for downloads over the web from it are limited to 20mb/s because that's my upload speed.

Greater Anglia Metro wrote:My web host is the cheapest.... It's me

I have an old Dell machine from a few years ago (the type used in schools and colleges) running Ubuntu server. All I need pay for is a domain, and the marginal electricity cost (it's amazing how little power it uses with no graphical interface). Only downside is the speed for downloads over the web from it are limited to 20mb/s because that's my upload speed.

It is still quite a decent upload speed I would say. Well, like I said, everything's expensive here.

There's a lot of variations from one country to another. I would be delighted with Quork's quoted costs compared to my own. Plus the performance issue, as things tend to work properly when the Germans are running them.

In Ireland the hosting is more expensive. For a adequate bandwidth allocation you should budget around €100 a year plus domain name registration plus VAT of 22% on the whole lot. My broadband connection costs me over €50 a month plus VAT and the performance is poor and well under the theoretical standard I'm paying for.

The "own server" option 24/7 means running the server for 8,760 hours a year. A server might rate at 250 watts. So, 2,190 units @ €0.162 costs €354.78 plus VAT. Not so cheap, especially when you home phone connection will restrict bandwidth and bugger up your browsing when someone's downloading you free stuff. Unless you have a really decent connection. or a separate line for the server.
On that calculation the professional hosting is actually cheaper, so it's a no brainer really. Even so, suppose I gave some item for every €7/£5 donation. I'd need to get about 30 donations to cover the hosting alone, after PayPal deducts handling. There's 500 potential users on this forum, tiny by comparison to other sims. Not all of those are active, or certain to be interested in Irish routes. That means if 6% of users donated the hosting's covered. Is this realistic? I think it could be for a UK operator, not so sure with routes outside the UK. And UK is the biggest market.

Not to mention, Graymac, I wouldn't recommend running a website from a home server unless you're also a knowledgeable systems administrator - it wouldn't take much for it to be taken down, or worse, hacked.

You might as well ask all our members, as another topic, to pass a few comments on what rating they give to developers sites, from the users viewpoint.

graymac wrote:In Ireland the hosting is more expensive. For a adequate bandwidth allocation you should budget around €100 a year plus domain name registration plus VAT of 22% on the whole lot. My broadband connection costs me over €50 a month plus VAT and the performance is poor and well under the theoretical standard I'm paying for

Not being that technical, I may be missing something here, but would you not be able to host your website outside the ROI if it were to be cheaper?

Not being that technical, I may be missing something here, but would you not be able to host your website outside the ROI if it were to be cheaper?

Yes, I could do. The difficulty is when things go wrong, as they might. I can get excellent support from hostingireland.ie, plus I prefer to keep Irish spending in Ireland where possible. I got the best deal I could without going offshore and the difference in cost would be a false economy in my judgement. Several issues arose on changing hosting which were sorted quickly, but otherwise may have caused service loss to users, this would not have been helped by trying to contact a foreign provider at distance and possibly in a different language.

With reference to the donation ideas, there's my thoughts on the matter in the celtictrainsim blog page. This is purely my take on it and isn't intended to be a solution for any or every other person with an interest.

Good, now how about hte original thought of this topic?

Strato has an own developer assistant as well, which is told to be very good; it's inclusive in all tariffs but the cheapest one. Can't tell for myself, as I'm using a CMS I programmed myself. And I don't call a limited number of adfree visitors "unlimited traffic"^^

BTT: Donation would be great as it is now - if it weren't for the fees you mentioned your bank takes for SEPA transfers... That's too much loss in my eyes. There must be some other solution... The easiest one would be to talk to your bank and ask them what could be done in the matter. You're the customer!

PayPal is the most reasonable for transaction charges and widest accepted globally. European banks make me want to spit nails. Robbing ba****ds, the lot of 'em.

Quork wrote:Strato has an own developer assistant as well, which is told to be very good; it's inclusive in all tariffs but the cheapest one. Can't tell for myself, as I'm using a CMS I programmed myself. And I don't call a limited number of adfree visitors "unlimited traffic"^^

BTT: Donation would be great as it is now - if it weren't for the fees you mentioned your bank takes for SEPA transfers... That's too much loss in my eyes. There must be some other solution... The easiest one would be to talk to your bank and ask them what could be done in the matter. You're the customer!

By unlimited traffic I meant you can download whatever and whenever you want and it won't influence you download speed. I will have to talk them, I can always change bank, this is insane...