Saw Herb York gave out these figures:
"All numbers are approximate and are not a complete listing of expenses:
Monthly cost for bandwidth - $800
Monthly cost for repair and maintenance - $1500
Monthly depreciation - $3000
Monthly admin cost - $0
Modification for 1/1 - 5/1 - $48,000
New servers required for increased traffic for 2004 - $20,000 - $40,000 (yet to be determined)
Revenue = $4000-$6000 per month"
Do you really believe these expenses? New servers need $20K???? Monthly bandwitdh + maintenance need almost $2.5K??? And wth is monthly depreciation?
I run a IT website with almost 70,000 unique visitors per month and about 250,000 unique page views monthly. My servers run on a dual Xeon 2.4C Ghz P4 with 36GB dual SCSI RAID. With my kind of traffic, I pay less than SGD$1K/month and about SGD$10K for the servers. Ok, maybe he got more (hard to believe you have more astronomers than PC people worldwide) but his figures are crazy
I really wonder what kind of servers is he running that he need US$20K-US$40K. A Cray Supercomputer?
Think he inflated everything. When Robert started Astromart, he did a favour to the community. Now, Herb is making Astromart into a money sucking machine. I cannot believe that US$4K-$6K revenue is not enough too sustain Astromart.
He make money out of Astromart, poor vendors have to raise price on their products. And we are the one who suffer.
AstroMart expenses
If you were to estimate that each ad gets 300 views over its lifetime (and some ads get a lot more hits than that) and that he did about 90000 ads this year (check from the ad numbering), that gives a little over 2m hits a month for the classifieds alone. The forums are also pretty active so i might estimate volume of similar magnitude (a few million hits a month), that would make his requirements more than 10 times of yours, Vinsr. I would think that for this sort of volume, he will go for separate app and DB servers of about US$10-20K each, probably a few webservers for load balancing, at least one router, firewall, switch etc. If there is redundancy then more hardware is required, but i dont think it is necessary. Hosting centre costs in Singapore are about S$2k per rack, he probably took a whole rack so the bandwidth cost is justified. The repair and maintenance if taken to include software maintenance, network and database managed services sounds a little cheap. His servers and depreciation sound a little expensive, probably bought branded stuff like Cisco and Sun. If depreciation includes software then its reasonable. If you think about it that Sun servers cost S$15K onwards for anything above a Netra then it sounds more possible. I don't think Herb is an IT expert nor has too much time to tinker around with astromart since he is already doing big business with ATWB so i suspect he might have outsourced a large part of the maintenance. At least if his numbers are to be believed then I read it that at least Herb is committed to Astromart which is a big plus to the astro community. If you think in terms of the whole astro industry, the cost of running astromart is very very small.
elton, he might have a lot of hits, but server requirements really depends on bandwidth. His hits are high...but his bandwidth is not really much because if you look at Astromart, there are a lot of text and not many pictures and these are not bandwidth intensive.elton wrote:If you were to estimate that each ad gets 300 views over its lifetime (and some ads get a lot more hits than that) and that he did about 90000 ads this year (check from the ad numbering), that gives a little over 2m hits a month for the classifieds alone. The forums are also pretty active so i might estimate volume of similar magnitude (a few million hits a month), that would make his requirements more than 10 times of yours, Vinsr. I would think that for this sort of volume, he will go for separate app and DB servers of about US$10-20K each, probably a few webservers for load balancing, at least one router, firewall, switch etc. If there is redundancy then more hardware is required, but i dont think it is necessary. Hosting centre costs in Singapore are about S$2k per rack, he probably took a whole rack so the bandwidth cost is justified. The repair and maintenance if taken to include software maintenance, network and database managed services sounds a little cheap. His servers and depreciation sound a little expensive, probably bought branded stuff like Cisco and Sun. If depreciation includes software then its reasonable. If you think about it that Sun servers cost S$15K onwards for anything above a Netra then it sounds more possible. I don't think Herb is an IT expert nor has too much time to tinker around with astromart since he is already doing big business with ATWB so i suspect he might have outsourced a large part of the maintenance. At least if his numbers are to be believed then I read it that at least Herb is committed to Astromart which is a big plus to the astro community. If you think in terms of the whole astro industry, the cost of running astromart is very very small.
I have 250,000 pages views and hits about 4 million. Each page has many pictures, banners, etc....that contributed to the hits. And pictures are really bandwidth intensive. Not forgetting that for IT sites, sometimes people take your pictures and they hot-link it to other IT sites (plenty in the world compared to astro sites). So you waste bandwidth on those too. For my server, even with all these bandwidth, my cost (i have 2 servers and 2 racks) did not exceed SGD$2K a month.
As for firewalls, cisco routers, switches and stuff...these are operated by the datacentre...not him. He just have to buy servers nd software....then plug it into the datacentre network equipments.
The question is not how many hits he gets, but rather what is his bandwidth per page. His one page is less than 70KB a majority of the time. So if you compare to a IT reveiw website which need about 400-500KB/page to load (because of pictures and banners) you see the difference in the bandwidth there.