Has anyone ever wondered what RadioReference's monthly costs are to provide our services? I figured I would take a moment to share with the community what we pay each month in hosting expenses. We obviously have other expenses, like taxes, payroll, commissions, etc, but our largest expense is our Web hosting hosts (servers, bandwidth, etc).
Our primary Web hosting partner is Amazon Web Services, which provides a fantastic cloud computing model which is critical for our ability to scale up and down based on demand, and pay only for what we use. We have also partnered with ServerBeach to provide a server external to Amazon Web Services for mail and monitoring activities.
Below is our latest invoice for the month of July's hosting on Amazon Web Services... (click the picture to see the invoice full size)
That's right, right about $8,285.00. We also paid ServerBeach approximately $200 for a server hosted with them. That means on a typical busy month we are looking at ~ $8500/month in hosting and bandwidth costs.
How does all this break down?
- $2700/month in server costs (web, database, archive, audio, and management servers)
- $1300/month in storage costs (audio archives, backups, databases, files etc)
- $4500/month in bandwidth (all those audio feeds)
Hopefully this gives a good perspective as to what it costs to run a high traffic, bandwidth intensive Web property.
Next up... our technical architecture. Ever wondered how many servers we have, what they do, and what software we run? Stay tuned!
