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Web Hosting for Auction Sites

There are many people in this world who prefer bartering instead of straight-up buying. Trying to get the best deal excites many people and the process of negotiation is most of the fun for them. For these people and for people who think they can get a better deal by bidding on something rather than just buying it, an auction site like E-bay is where they will go to meet their shopping needs. Since there are a lot of these people, an well-done auction site is bound to draw lots of traffic and could potentially provide lots of income for the owner. However, having a successful auction site is not an easy thing to do and at the core if it all is the hosting package that the auction site is running on. Choosing the correct hosting package for an auction site is critical to the success of the site. Slow servers and frequent downtimes are two frequent problems for auction sites that will turn away many potential buyers. In this article, we will look at the hosting needs of auction sites and the possible hosting solution that you may want to think about using.

The most pressing concern for an auction site is server resource usage in regards to CPU cycles and bandwidth. An auction site is highly MYSQL query intensive and a popular one or even one that gets around one thousands visits per day can easily run up the server load and get you suspended on your hosting plan. When looking for a host, you should look for a hosting company that has optimizations in place for running intensive applications to help your auction script run better. You should also check the Terms of Service agreement and the fine print it contains to see if the host has any special provisions or extra costs for excessive usage of CPU cycles per second. I have seen a few hosts who have this in their fine print. Users neglect to read this and as a result are billed the following month with hundreds of dollars do to “excessive CPU Cycles” in their usage graphs. RAM usage is also a concern for Auction sites. While I have not seen a host who bills for “excessive server RAM usage”, I know of many hosts, especially hosts that grossly oversell,that suspend accounts if they are using up too much of the total server’s RAM. To limit use on these resources, many hosts put in place restrictions on the number of MYSQL database connections allowed to be open at the same time. If you go over this limit your account will either automatically be suspended or the additional users will not be able to access your site. Shared hosts have limits of anywhere from as little as 5 simultaneous connections allowed to over 30 allowed depending on the host. If you are planning to run an auction site on a shared account, look for a host that is in the higher end of this spectrum.

Aside from server usage, the next most pressing thing for an auction site is technical support from the hosting company. Since auction sites many times run server-intensive applications that require heavy database usage, it is very likely that sooner or later there will be a connection problem or database malfunction. When this happens, it is possible that your entire site will be down and only technical support people can get it up and running again in this situation. Because of this, you will need to find a host with a short response time(2 hours max) and knowledgeable staff. You should also find a host who constantly monitors their server so if your goes down, they are immediately aware of it. The only way to find out the truth about the quality of technical support for a host is to ask around in large web hosting forums such as www.webhostingtalk.com . People at these forums are more than happy to share with you experiences with hosting companies and will give poor reviews to hosts that do not perform well. An overall good status at a forum such as the one mentioned above generally means that technical support staff at the host will be adequate enough to help you with your needs. Do not ask the host itself because, by common sense, they will say they are great regardless if they are or not. Also be careful of web hosting review sites as many of the editor’s picks may be biased by high commission rates offered by hosting companies. Be sure to ask around in more than one place to get a better overall opinion of the host(s) you are looking at.

The third thing that should be of concern for an auction site is security. For any site that provides means to do financial transactions, an 128-but encrypted SSL certificate is necessary for secure e-commerce transactions. Lacking this will lose you many customers as they will view buying from you a risk because without secure encryption, it is easy for someone to steal their financial information. When picking a host, make sure that they offer this with their package or they have an add-on option for this feature.

The last thing and the thing that raises least concern is disk space and bandwidth. This, unfortunately, is what people usually look at first when purchasing a hosting plan. While important, big numbers for disk space and bandwidth are generally a marketing tactic to lure customers in. In reality, a site that is just getting started will not need 500 gigabytes of storage or 3 tera-bytes of bandwidth a month. For an auction site 5-10 gigabytes of storage will be plenty and 100GB of bandwidth per month is more than adequate to support a healthy number of visitors. When choosing a host, I would recommend against a host that offers an enormous amount of space and bandwidth for a very cheap price as that is a sure sign of gross overselling. While overselling does not necessarily mean trouble, the more you oversell, the more likely that your server will have lockdowns due to high load caused by users. Oversellers also tend to pile far too many accounts per server for the server to run efficiently. For a good environment suited to heavy application hosting like the kind an auction site needs, I suggest looking for a place that has about at least a 25 cents per gig of bandwidth ratio for a shared hosting account. Although this may seem expensive compared to the other options out there, it will save you a lot of headaches down the road.

Now that we have looked at the needs of an auction site, lets look at some of the options you have for hosting one.

1. Free hosting – This is generally a bad idea for an auction site. Free hosts many times will not have features like PHP/MYSQL that are pretty much mandatory for running an auction site. Even the hosts that do offer PHP/MYSQL tend to have severe restrictions on their usage per account. Free hosts are also often lacking in technical support and suspend accounts the moment they see any possibility of trouble. They generally will not work with you to solve problems and if your account is suspended, you will generally lose all your data without any way of getting it back. There are some more reliable free hosts, but these require that you put either a banner Ad on your page or that you post a certain number of posts per month in their forum. If you are willing to do these things then going for one of these hosts may be a way to start. However, do not expect to stay long on these hosts once your visitor account rises up into the hundreds per day. Some free hosts I can recommend are StoneRocket(http://www.stonerocket.com) and Zoomcities(http://www.zoomcities.com). Note that both of these hosts do not offer that much bandwidth so expansion possibilities are limited with these free hosts.
2. Shared Hosting – Shared hosting is where a lot of auction sites will initially start their business and those that never grow tend to stay on a shared solution forever. The service and value a shared solution provides varies greatly from host to host. Some hosts will bend over backwards to work with know while others will not really care about each individual customer. On all shared accounts, you run the risk of having your account suspended for CPU/RAM overuse and you have a decent chance of being put on a crowded server where performance may be slow. On some shared hosts you might also get the “you are out of disk space” or “excessive bandwidth” message when you are not even close to the disk space and bandwidth allotment that you have been promised. This is not because the host is trying to cheat you, it is probably because the users on that server are using a bigger % of their resources than the host had planned and the server has just run out of space or bandwidth and the host has not had time to buy more. Like mentioned in the above article, try to find a host that offers modest amounts of space and bandwidth for a decent price and not a host that offers enormous amounts for a cheap price as the technical support at such hosts is usually questionable at best. If you are going with a shared solution, here are some hosts to avoid: Powweb, Ipower – these have the reputation of being the absolute worst when it comes to customer support. Some hosts that you might want to consider but may not be optimal are: Hostgator, midphase, dreamhost – these hosts have mixed reviews on forums, some love them, others hate them. Above them, there are hosts which are considered premium hosts that you can rely on: mediatemple.com and downtownhost.com – these hosts are quite a bit more expensive for the space/bandwidth you get but provide excellent technical support.
3. Virtual Private Server(VPS) – Many people who have some financial backing and have a solid business plan for an auction site will start on a VPS. On a VPS, you do not have to worry about getting suspended for over-usage of sources as each account is separately sliced off in a VPS environment. Others cannot use the resources allotted to you and you cannot use the space allotted to others. Therefore no one account will slow the entire server down. You are given a certain amount of CPU and RAM that you can use and a “burst RAM” rate for peak hour traffic. For people who are serious about starting an auction site but don’t quite have the means to purchase a dedicated server from the get-go, a VPS is a solid choice. I would recommend a VPS from wiredtree.com as they provide professional services and support.
4. Dedicated Server – This is the solution you eventually want to end up on with your auction site. If a VPS is still not good enough to handle your site, you will have to upgrade to a dedicated server to get the power you need. In this environment, you are the only one on the machine so you do not have to share resources with anyone else. There is no burst rate, but you can always upgrade the CPU and RAM if you need more power. I would recommend getting a managed dedicated server from Liquidweb, wiredtree, gate2vn.net, or Rackspace(if you have the money) for great service and support.
5. Dedicated Cluster – Very few websites actually run on this solution. This is the ultra-high end of hosting where several servers are working together to feed the needs of your site. This is most like the setup E-bay uses. Most dedicated providers will be happy to help you set this up and provide management for an extra fee. If you are just starting, you should not look here as it will take a long time to grow up to the point where you actually need this kind of a solution.

We have now looked at the needs of auction-site hosting as well as the possible hosting platforms. With this information and suggestions of which hosting companies to go with, you should have a solid idea of what direction to look for choosing a hosting solution. Be aware of key features such as CPU,RAM, and technical support and always keep these in mind when asking about or talking to a potential host.

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