Website questions

[Mikius10001]

Let me start off with, I'm not a developed,coder, or website designer. I do however have a colleague who is one, but before I go to him with an idea I have, I have a couple questions that I feel I might be judged on a tiny bit if I ask without having done the 'research'. That's where you lot come in  Firstly, do you think that I would need my own dedicated hosted server to have a website that would most likely at most be hit 2000 'unique' times a month. I say unique in that 2000 different people would be hitting the server, but multiple times through the month, say 7 or 8 times. Or do you think that Amazon or Googles hosting would be fine. To be honest I haven't looked in to many others as they all seem to be 'build your website with us' type services. Secondly, should I have a dedicated database to house the lets say 5000 1 page text documents in PDF format that I would need to house, or would cloud storage be good enough for that. Based on the query information set out before. Finally, would you suggest, if there was a subscription service for the site, using Paypal as the go to, with an option for CC payments? Or just skip Paypal (I've head not necessarily the best things)

[LogicalDrm]

Can't say anything to traffic plan. But if you are going to expand, going for service which has advanced service plans will help. You can then just upgrade when you feel the need, without having to move whole site to another host.

 

Which leads to hosting. I would use external hosting service. Basic paid plans do have something like 500mb storage. Depending on how big your PDFs are, you could host them same place or use some other service. Just keep in mind that external service needs to support sharing with link directly to file for it being somewhat usable. If you have your own server at hand, use that. But there's no need to get dedicated server. Those are really expensive and it sounds like you could be fine with basic or advanced plans. Its been awhile since I last checked what hosts provide, so can't give any better examples.

 

PayPal is option for CC. Its bit safer as you need to enter password for payments, not just CC number. Its your decision. Both can do monthly payments. If host is some bigger one or otherwise well known, it doesn't matter at all. They won't release your payment info like some shady XXX rated sites might.

[KuJoe]

17 hours ago, Mikius10001 said:

Let me start off with, I'm not a developed,coder, or website designer. I do however have a colleague who is one, but before I go to him with an idea I have, I have a couple questions that I feel I might be judged on a tiny bit if I ask without having done the 'research'. That's where you lot come in  Firstly, do you think that I would need my own dedicated hosted server to have a website that would most likely at most be hit 2000 'unique' times a month. I say unique in that 2000 different people would be hitting the server, but multiple times through the month, say 7 or 8 times. Or do you think that Amazon or Googles hosting would be fine. To be honest I haven't looked in to many others as they all seem to be 'build your website with us' type services. Secondly, should I have a dedicated database to house the lets say 5000 1 page text documents in PDF format that I would need to house, or would cloud storage be good enough for that. Based on the query information set out before. Finally, would you suggest, if there was a subscription service for the site, using Paypal as the go to, with an option for CC payments? Or just skip Paypal (I've head not necessarily the best things)

No you don't need a dedicated server. I run a free web hosting company and just ran a benchmark test against one of my test sites on the same server as my clients and I'm able to handle 750-800 hits per second without a problem.

 

Depending on the amount of storage required for the PDFs will determine whether hosting it internal or on cloud storage, just take note if you use something like SquareSpace they don't allow you to use your storage as "file storage" and regularly have limits on how many files you can have on your account and the types of files.

 

As for payment options. I offer my clients the option of PayPal, Stripe (credit card/AliPay), and BitPay (bitcoin). PayPal is by far the most popular payment processor and their fees are among the lowest. Stripe has the same fees and is really good for people who don't want to use PayPal or can't. BitPay is great because there are 0 fees, it gets converted to USD immediately, and they can't perform chargebacks 3+ months later like with PayPal and Stripe. Bitcoin payments are becoming more and more popular in my experience also.

[Mikius10001]

On 10/5/2016 at 1:00 AM, LoGiCalDrm said:

Can't say anything to traffic plan. But if you are going to expand, going for service which has advanced service plans will help. You can then just upgrade when you feel the need, without having to move whole site to another host.

 

Which leads to hosting. I would use external hosting service. Basic paid plans do have something like 500mb storage. Depending on how big your PDFs are, you could host them same place or use some other service. Just keep in mind that external service needs to support sharing with link directly to file for it being somewhat usable. If you have your own server at hand, use that. But there's no need to get dedicated server. Those are really expensive and it sounds like you could be fine with basic or advanced plans. Its been awhile since I last checked what hosts provide, so can't give any better examples.

 

PayPal is option for CC. Its bit safer as you need to enter password for payments, not just CC number. Its your decision. Both can do monthly payments. If host is some bigger one or otherwise well known, it doesn't matter at all. They won't release your payment info like some shady XXX rated sites might.

Thanks for the info. What about if all the information was on another site that had an API that I could just pull the info through? Would that make things easier? (Aside from the fact that I've now just added another potential point of failure)

 

And @KuJoe you say you run a free web hosting company ehhh?

[KuJoe]

1 hour ago, Mikius10001 said:

Thanks for the info. What about if all the information was on another site that had an API that I could just pull the info through? Would that make things easier? (Aside from the fact that I've now just added another potential point of failure)

 

And @KuJoe you say you run a free web hosting company ehhh?

In my experience adding unnecessary complexity to web applications is a bad idea. Unless the complexity adds some form of cost savings or security I would avoid it.

 

I don't advertise my companies here but I've been in the free web hosting scene for a while (I wrote an ebook on it many many moons ago). It's one of my favorite hobbies that I invest hours and hours of coding in.