Web Hosting for Celebrity Sites

By Web Hosting on Nov 17, 2007 in Web Hosting

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This blog post offers tips and information about web hosting for celebrities related sites. Our recommendation would be to order your hosting from this web host for your celebrity gallery or fan sites and blogs.

Web Hosting for Celebrity Sites

A hot topic among many social circles is famous people or celebrities. Celebrities are often popular search terms on search engines and news about them are widely read. Many people want to cash in on this opportunity by building a website about a certain celebrity or about celebrities in general. These types of sites are wildly popular and if done right, can be very profitable.

Before you can start raking in money from building a celebrity site however, you need to start by choosing a hosting service that fits the needs of a celebrity site. This is a hard task as celebrity sites often require a combination of many different types of server resources in order to function. In general, a celebrity site needs to clear legal bars, have enough CPU/RAM to run the script they are running off of, and have enough space and Bandwidth to store stuff about the celebrity and serve the content to users. Above all, you need reliable tech support to make sure the server you are on are running on works and to get your site back up if it should go down.

First, there are some hosts who do not allow certain types of celebrity content on their servers. Usually the content in question has to do with nudity, pictures that are too revealing, and other content that might be considered “pornographic” in nature. Unfortunately, this “edgy content” is usually the content that attracts the most people on a celebrity site and is a must-have for any popular celebrity site. So before you do anything, ask the host you are thinking about going with if they allow “edgy celebrity” content. If you do not ask, you risk having your account suspended without getting any refund once this content is found on the host’s servers.

Second a celebrity site must have the adequate CPU and RAM to power the site and the script that is running the site. This is usually the biggest problem for celebrity sites. Since celebrity sites are not the kind of site that makes a lot of money per visitor, it has to depend on massive quantities of traffic to be profitable. Massive quantities of visitors also means massive quantities of mySQL queries and PHP execution cycles per second for the server. This can easily crash a server and will most likely get your account suspended if you are in a shared hosting environment. For this reason, you need a server that is optimized for running a high number of mySQL queries at the same time. Ask your host if they have such optimizations before you sign up. If you are thinking about going with a shared plan, also be sure to ask how many simultaneous mySQL connections are allowed at the same time. For a celebrity site, try to find a host that allows fifty of more simultaneous mySQL connections on a shared account. If you go with a host that has tight restrictions in this area then most likely your site is going to be down or unviewable much of the time. Be sure that caching is allowed on the server as this will save both mySQL queries and bandwidth.

Third, a celebrity, unlike most sites, must have plenty of disk space and bandwidth. The bulk of a celebrity site’s content does not come from the HTML pages themselves, the bulk of the content is in celebrity images and videos. Images and videos take up much more space and bandwidth than regular text files so you will need plenty of storage room. For starters, look for a host that offers at least 10GB of storage space to store your files. 10 GB will roughly store 20,000 50kb images or 5000 2mb videos. This should give you enough storage room for an decent amount of content for your site. If you happen to need more disk space, you can aways arrange to purchase more disk space with your host on the cheap. Celebrity sites also need a lot of bandwidth in order to serve the content. While regular text pages average perhaps 10-20kb per page, a celebrity site with many images can average over 200kb per page and one with videos can easily average over 1mb per page. Because of this, a celebrity site may need more than 20 times the bandwidth of a regular site. For starters, try to find a hosting service that gives at least 150 GB of bandwidth. This amount of bandwidth will let you serve 5000 pageviews per day of 1mb sized celebrity videos. While 5000 does not seem like a large amount, if you are getting that many pageviews a day, you are probably generating enough income to move on to a better hosting solution with more resources and bandwidth. When looking at space and bandwidth for your celebrity site, think small and not big as websites in a crowded category such as celebrity sites take a long time to actually get popular so having tons of extra space and bandwidth will not do you much good.

Last of all and perhaps most important of all, find a host that has good technical support. This may be the hardest part in picking the correct host. Many people simply gloss over this part and think they are going to get priority technical support because they are a paying customer. This is sadly not the case. As a shared customer, you are simply one of thousands of clients that the host has, and if you are particularly troublesome, the host may actually be better off without you than with you. In this case, technical support will not be too motivated to help you with your issues. The only real way to find out how the customer support is at a host is to ask in forums such as webhostingtalk.com or go to one of the many web hosting review sites. I personally think that forums are much better places to go because web hosting review sites are often places where web hosts advertise their business so the editor’s reviews may be biased. I have seen several terrible services get recommended at these sites just because sales commissions are high for these terrible services. On a forum, you will get honest reviews from current customers or past customers and you will get a true feel of what the host is like. The hosting company may sometimes come and try to hype up their service but other users are quick to point this out. Spend time asking the host itself and reading comments on forums before you pick a host.

New that we have looked at the needs of a celebrity site, lets look at some of the possible hosting solutions that you may choose to pursue.

1. Free hosting – While I would recommend people to stay away from this option for any serious website, I realize that most people who are starting celebrity sites are not professional webmasters and may not want to invest anything into the website at first. If this is the case and you want to see a bit of income before you move to a paid host, then a free host may be the way to go. On free hosts, you should be aware that your bandwidth limitations are going to be very small and the CPU/RAM that you are allotted is also going to be small. Your account may be suspended for the tiniest reason or for no reason at all. Since you are not paying for the service, you really do not have a valid complaint against the host. You do get what you pay for and in this case, you are not paying anything. Features such as PHP/MYSQL which are essential to running any kind of site may also be missing from a free host and most free hosts will not let you host video files or files over a certain filesize so your planned celebrity site may not work on a free hosting service. There are a few good services out there but most of them require posting in forums or banner ads on your site. If you can tolerate these things then you may want to take a look at hosting services like www.stonerocket.net. Note that even on these “high end” free hosts you will have to move to a paid hosting service once you receive more than a few hundred visitors a day.
2. Shared hosting – A shared plan puts you on a server with hundreds of other users. Support is usually better than it is at a free hosting service but could still be lacking if you are not on a good shared host. Server performance on a share host will also vary and much of it depends on what the other users on your server are doing. If you are stuck on a server that already has a high load, you may want to ask your host to move you to a newer server. If you are the one causing the high load, then you have a good chance of being suspended. On a shared host, you will have a limit on mySQL connections that can be open at the same time and thus it will limit how many users can be on your site at any given moment. Usually I would advise against going for a overselling shared hosting service such as 1&1 or Ipowerweb, but for a celebrity site where the webmaster is not willing to pay a lot of money for the hosting solution, such a service may be okay. If you do choose a service such as the ones mentioned above, you will have plenty of disk space and bandwidth to build upon but your CPU/RAM constraints will prevent your site from getting too popular. You may get lucky and be put on a new server so the server resource constraints will be better for a while. But sooner or later, the server is going to fill up and you will notice slowdowns in page loading times and errors in website functionality. If shared hosting is the way you choose to go, I would suggest a service like downtownhost.com that gives you decent amounts of space and bandwidth but can also provide excellent support around the clock.
3. VPS(Virtual Private Server) hosting – This is actually a pretty good solution for a popular celebrity site. A VPS with 512MB or more RAM may be the ideal solution for a celebrity site getting somewhere between 10,000-50,000 unique visitors a day. The cost of such a managed plan will be around the $75/month range but with so many visitors, you should have no trouble generating that amount of income. Ask for a high-bandwidth VPS and most hosts will give you a special VPS plan with 1TB or more of bandwidth. Getting suspended is not an issue on a VPS because you cannot go over the section of resources that your VPS is given. You have a burst rate of RAM for peak hours but one site will generally not slow down the entire server because it is constantly spiking in traffic. If you need a larger VPS account, look at wiredtree.com’s hybrid dedicated plan.
4. Dedicated Server – This is for those celebrity sites that have made it to the big time and attract hundreds of thousands of user per day. Such a site could not be handled even on a VPS plan and must move to a dedicated plan with a dedicated bandwidth pipe to serve visitor’s needs. When you are at this point, its time to look at getting managed server in a datacenter such as layertech, softlayer, Rackspace, wiredtree, or ThePlanet. While buying directly from the datacenter is an option, it is usually better to buy from a hosting company running out of one of those datacenters and get the management that comes along with the server. A dedicated server will only serve you and no one else and bandwidth expansion options are the most plentiful with a dedicated server. If need be, you can purchase a 1GBit dedicated line for around $20,000/month if your site demands it. At this point, its not so much about server concerns as it is about generating the most revenue from your traffic.

These are the basic hosting options for a celebrity site. There are other options like co-location and dedicated server clusters, but most people will not go for these options unless they have a specific reason for doing so. The options ranging from shared to dedicated hosting should be enough for you to choose from to start your celebrity site.

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