

Projecting hosting costs for business plan. - phpdev

Hi.
I'm writing a business plan for my web app.
I need to project my hosting costs for 6/12/18/24 months into the future for my financial projections etc..
Is there a way to predict the costs? 
EG: For every 250,000 hits per month you would roughly need 1 server?
Being projections, it doesn't need to be 100% accurate! Just a ball park/rule of thumb figure for the plan!
Thanks.
======
babul
Most decent hosting providers give detailed breakdowns of their service costs
(servers/cpu-slices/bandwith/transfer-rates/limits/etc) so if you are able to
approximate your usage levels e.g. by comparison to the patterns of other
established similar apps/companies, you can do a good job in calculating these
costs.

Even not knowing your usage levels, you can make reasonable assumptions and
hence choose appropriate services with fixed costs and work on that basis.

Amazon Web Services, SliceHost, and the like are particularly good if you do
not know how your service/app will perform over time as they allow you to
scale with ease compared to other more traditional hosting solutions and
although more expensive in the long term (i.e. buying dedicated servers are
cheaper), is cheaper in the short term and actually makes creating early
projections much easier.

~~~
babul
It also removes many of the initial fixed costs such as dedicated servers, and
will actually bring your projections down to lower levels making, in many
cases, the proposition more attractive to investors (if that is what you are
looking for).

------
olefoo
If you can profile your application do so, data trumps estimates every time.

For a web based app your scarce resources are memory, bandwidth and database
connections, disk space isn't usually an issue at first.

One factor to keep in mind is that as you add features to your app, your usage
profile will change, mostly by growing heavier.

