This piece looks at ways to reduce costs and tighten the purse strings if your business is primarily online
Some months back, I had written about ways to reduce costs and manage through the slowdown. That piece was for brick and mortar operations. Subsequently, I wrote about the 19 myths of doing business online.
This third in the series looks at ways to reduce costs and tighten the purse strings if your business is primarily online.
1. Change your data center plan
Data center costs, hardware, hosting, management (what they call managed hosting) and bandwidth, all of these form a significant part of the costs for any online business. Typically, you sign up for a given data center plan. For example, let us assume that you are on a Savvis managed compute plan. You are charged a fixed amount every month for a given menu of hardware, bandwidth and services. Typically, these contracts continue for ever, with your credit card being debited every month in advance.
The first step is to renegotiate the contract downwards. No. Data center plans are not inscribed in stone. They are open to being re-negotiated.
As part of the re-negotiation, there are a few other things you can do. Typically each server comes with a fixed amount of bandwidth. If you have bought tour hosting piecemeal instead of as a group, then you may be paying overage charges for some servers while you will be under-utilizing bandwidth on others. Combine all your servers and ask for the bandwidth to be pooled if that is the case. If you have limits to the number of free service tickets per server, then ask for pooling that also.
If you have ordered your servers some time back, you will find that the data center would have upgraded the plan in current offerings. For example, Rackspace now offers 1TB of bandwidth per server per month with even their basic offerings. About a year back, if I remember right, this was just 2,000 GB. You can easily ask for an upgrade to the current offering if you are paying overage charges.
2. Change data center
In the good old days, when cash flow was not an issue, you could afford to be at the best of data centers and not cringe at the costs. But today, do you really need that level of service, or more importantly, do you want to pay that much?
The best of data centers, say like Savvis could cost in US$ 1,000 + per server per month. One rung lower, for example Rackspace would be upwards of US$ 600 + per month. The third level, some one like ServerBeach, without the management options would be US$200 + per month range.
The savings are obvious.
3. Deploy across multiple data centers
Now, changing data centers is not an easy task, and in many cases just the complexity of the application you have been running would rule out a complete data center change. The way out then to reduce costs is to deploy your applications across multiple data centers.
Every web business would include multiple applications. For example, there would be your core business application, and there would be add on applications like e-mailers, video hosting, microsites and so on. Now, all of these do not have the same criticality or maintenance level requirements.
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In such a case, you could deploy them across servers with different service level agreements or even multiple data centers with different costs and service levels.
For example, your core application could be at Savvis, your secondary applications could be at Rackspace and your e-mailers etc. could be at ServerBeach. You may even opt to do small volume pilots on shared hosters like BlueHost, who start at under US$10 per month!
4. Change your analytics
Web analytics is a software that tells you who has come to your website, from where and what they did there. Web analytics is costly, damn costly. And that is all the more reason to replace it with a free one.
Many large web sites (read websites with large traffic) use Google Analytics, which is free. If you do not like Google, Yahoo has a hosted analytics service that is offered on the SAAS model. There are many other hosted analytics providers like Compete that you could try out.
If you do not want to go for a hosted option, then you could opt for AWStats, which parses your webserver logs to give you the analytics.
5. Consolidate and Virtualize
Servers for web apps have a nasty habit of proliferating. Every time you want to add a new application to the pool, it is too easy to add just another server. So, after some time, you end up with poorly loaded servers or servers that are used only for part of the time.
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written by Devang Vibhakar@SpeakBindas, January 17, 2010
Thank you for sharing.
written by digvijay "VJ" Singh, April 15, 2009
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Last time I checked 2,000GB is double the size of 1TB.