Hosting Your Penny Auction Website.
You can’t be cheap on hosting when it comes to hosting your penny auction website because your penny auction website is not just any website that can be hosted on any server. When we say that we are an A to Z penny software service firm, it means that we also provide web hosting. If you are to compare apple to apple, then we will challenge you to find a better price than what we have. For those who would like to host our penny auction software in your own server(s), the choice is yours. However, it’s not recommended because it will cost you more to buy your own server and to pay for the technical support and maintenance on your own.
It is absolutely not recommended that you use a shared hosting account at all for deploying a penny auction site because it doesn’t allow you or your web server admin to do customization setup that needed for a penny auction site to work properly. Furthermore, a true and complete Penny Auction Software is not a typical E-commerce website but a very sophisticated and database driven web application with hundreds of calculations per minutes. Our PAS is built to handle heavy traffic loads. Therefore it requires a good investment in the server hardware and software.
Problems With Using A Shared Hosting Account:
Reason #1) CPU Throttling – Do a Google search on it.
Reason #2) Cannot setup or run Cronjobs / Scheduled Tasks at all.
Reason #3) Cannot setup or run Cronjobs / Scheduled Tasks every minute.
Reason #4) Database is not hosted locally (localhost) on same server.
Reason #5) Not able to correctly configure server to run optimally.
Reason #6) Limited RAM Resources.
Reason #7) Limited Server Connections.
Hosting Requirements: These requirements are subjected to change as we upgraded our software to meet the changing of user demands and technologies.
DEDICATED WINDOW SERVER – .NET VERSION $165 per month with a minimum of three months contract.
Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard
Processor:Intel Core i7 – 3.40 GHz
RAM:16 GB
Total Disk Space:4000 GB
RAID:Optional
Disk Drive(s):
2000 GB (Drive #1)
2000 GB (Drive #2)
Bandwidth Quota:20000 GB
Firewall:ASA 5505
Control Panel Type:Plesk
Daily Backups: Stored for 7 Days
SSL Certificate: Optional
Database: MS SQL 2008 R2 Workgroup Edition
LINUX SERVER – PHP VERSION $145 per month with a minimum of three months contract.
Linux (Centos) Operating System
Apache Webserver – Do NOT Use Internet Information Server (IIS).
8 GB RAM Minimum.
1000 MB Transfer Bandwidth = 1 Billion Page Refreshes.
4 CPU – Any Speed or Make.
100 GB Disk space / Hardrive – Min.
Ability To Setup and Run Cron jobs / Scheduled Tasks Every Minute.
MySQL 4.xx or 5.xx.
PHP 4.xx or 5.xx.
Flex Server with Wowza Media Systems, your own license.
Jre 7 & Java enabled.
Five Biggest Technical Misconceptions about Penny Auction Software
I spent an average of 30 hours per week working with prospective customers who, for most of them, are sincerely interested in getting into the “online auction business” and this includes both traditional online auction and penny auction arenas. The greatest challenges for me is to educate our potential customers about the complexity of this web based application. One hand, I don’t want to scare them off with all the technical complexities and the other hand I don’t want them to have any misconception of the business. Here are some of the biggest misconceptions:
1. Any penny script will do. Based on our study, over 90% of the penny scripts sold on the internet will not pass the functionality, security and stability tests. Most of the problems resides in the stability. Most of the time, it works fine until it hits heavy traffic load where thousands of users hit (bidding clicks) the database at the same time. There are many factors that could contribute to this instability. It could be hardware, it could be software or it could be network’s bandwidth or a combination of all three. Network bandwidth problem is something that we have very little control over. Hardware problem is a budgetary dependent so therefore depending on your budget, you can always add more servers if needed. The sad part of it is that too many software vendors out there deliberately scaled down their actual hardware requirements to make it sounds affordable for the customers in order to sell their software. Once the customer bought the software and hosted on the server, the problems show up. What I want to focus here is the software problem because it’s the biggest and the most expensive problem to solve assuming they know how to solve it. Think of it this way. The most crucial part of your penny auction software is the database; It’s where it retains all the records and all the bids history. There is a limit as to how many records your database can hold before it overflows and there is a limit as to how many cycles your hard drive can run per second. If there is no smart strategy in your coding to avoid the overflow of data and to circumvent the limitation of your hard drive’s limitation; then the “choke up” or “freezing” of your bidding system is guaranteed.
2. Website vs. Website Application. Many of my customers believe that the Penny Auction or Traditional Auction system that we have is a typical website. Yes, it’s a website and NO it’s not. By my definition, a website is a website if you can host it in a shared hosting server with little or no database and a website is a web application is when you need a powerful dedicated server to run it because of its databases and system architectures. Now, I have to admit that’s a lousy way of defining it but it’s the simplest way I can define it without getting into al the technical jargons and all the computer science’s theory and practice. So when you viewed the Penny Auction as a web application, you will be better prepared for it when it comes to the server hardware’s needs.
3. Amateur vs. Expert. “Setting up a server to run a penny auction website and managing is like setting up and managing other websites”. The truth is that you need someone who knows how the system is coded, what sort of traffic load that you will have on the site and how to best handle such traffic load. You may only need one dedicated server to handle it and you may need several of them each handling a specific assigned task. The bottom line is that any credible Penny Auction software needs a server expert to configure and setup your server for you. An amateur won’t do it.
4. Not all Penny Website Created Equal. “All penny auction software is the same since they all doing the same thing or providing basically the same features or functionalities”. Not quite! Depending on how it coded, the type of database architecture it used, how many tasks it handle per second, how many cron job services and how often they run, etc, will determine the type of server and server architectures you need.
5. One solution fits all. If anyone is telling you that one size fits all for your Penny Auction website, then he or she is lieing to you or he or she has no clue what he or she is talking about. The most difficult part here is to find a right solution (size) that fits your business need at the present and being able to project the future growth where you can scale your system to fit the projected demand. At DMS, we started you out with our basic package of just $149 per month for three months. We then evaluate your need based on the past performance and recommend the appropriate solution to meet the projected future demand. The good thing here is that this is a good problem to have if you have it. It means that you have more than 10,000 active users and the average concurrent users is more than 2,000. Unlike most of the PAS software out there, our software is built with scalability in mind.
About the Author. This article is contributed by Phillip Nguyen. He is currently serving as the President of Digital Marketing Solutions LLC since August 2000. His firm also designed and developed the PAS software which can be found on www.pennyauctionsoftware.com. Phillip received his Bachelor at Western Michigan University and his Master degree in Software Engineering & Network at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. He has been the keynote speaker for many important I.T. seminars relating to computer sciences and computer networks.