Cost of Web Hosting Services

(Sidebar to Jakob Nielsen's column "When Search Engines Become Answer Engines.")

I estimate that it costs 0.003 cents per page view to have your website hosted.

For example, useit.com resides on a Web hosting service called Pair Networks. I have used Pair since 1996 and been very satisfied. Good performance and almost no downtime. For small and medium sites, it only makes sense to use hosted Web servers; it's too expensive to run the server in-house and have your own system administrators.

My service with Pair costs $75 per month, and I get about 1.3 M page views per month. This equates to 0.006 cents per page view. However, I am using less than half the capacity of the server, so it would be possible to serve pages for 0.003 cents if traffic increased.

Economies of scale make it reasonable to assume that bigger sites pay 0.003 cents or less per page view.

(Domain name registration at GoDaddy.com adds about $8 per year, but for a mid-sized site that's negligible.)

> Other Alertbox columns (complete list)
> Sign up for newsletter that will notify you of new Alertboxes