So, with a goal of transparency – here’s what the costs of running the blog are on a month-by-month basis.

Hosting

Baeldung is hosted over on Websynthesis, using their Professional plan, which runs at 97$ / month.

Images and any other static files are hosted by MaxCDN, where I’m using their 100GB, 9$ / month plan.

And of course, I’m using Pingdom to know when the site goes down. I’m on their Starter plan, which is 15$ / month.

So, overall, hosting and keeping the site up and running on autopilot works up to about 121$ / month.

Marketing and Email

Marketing is an interesting category to look at – email being of course the largest expense.

First, the email list is managed over on Aweber, and the service costs 19$ for the base fee and $50 for the subscribers, totaling 69$ / month.

This is for under 10.000 subscribers. As you as you go over the 10K (which for Baeldung is going to happen this week) – you jump over to 130$ / month, which would total 149$ / month.

Because of this jump, I’m moving to Drip this month. That’s 149$ as well, but in terms of features, there’s really no comparison.

Now, because Aweber on its own can’t do email automation for jack, I’m using Aweber Pro Tools to integrate with Aweber and do that right; the service is 29$ / month.

Moving on from email, I’m making good use of Leadpages on their Standard plan, at 37$ / month. They run a fantastic product over there.

To sum up, the email and marketing overall cost is 215$ / month.

Developers, VAs

Running a site isn’t just about content. Things go down. Things break. Things need to be improved. Things need to be managed and researched.

To that end, I work with a WordPress developer on a monthly ongoing basis, to do some of the custom stuff on the site and occasionally fix things. It’s a small, recurring contract at 100$ / month.

I also work with a VA to free me up and do the more administrative tasks – which usually is 50-100$ / month (depending on how much work there is).

They’re using Tahometer to track their work, on their Small plan, running at 12$ / month.

So, overall, this category sits somewhere at about 187$ / month.

Totals and Conclusion

Finally, adding everything together, the total monthly cost of running Baeldung is 523$ / month. I’m sure I skipped over some small service or other, and there are of course a lot of one-time expenses, but this looks about right.

Hopefully that will give you some insight into the costs of running a site.

The post The Costs of Running a Blog first appeared on Meta Baeldung.

This week I decided to move all of my sites from WPEngine to a new hosting platform – Traffic Planet Hosting. I first heard of Traffic Planet Hosting from reading “Why Your Webhost Cannot Be Trusted – How WP Engine Hijacked My Business” by Matthew Woodward.

I have been with WPEngine for a about 3 years now – always on their middle 99$ plan – mainly because I had more traffic than their bottom plan allows, and there was no incremental billing back when I signed up.

Let me start of by saying that I’m not leaving WPEngine because of speed issues – the speed of my site has been OK:

That’s not to say my experience with WPEngine has been good all around – I had the occasional ticket left unanswered for 3 straight days and the like – but overall I had a positive experience with them. And – it has to be said – I will miss having a staging area for my sites.

No – the reason I’m migrating is that the recent Panda 4.0 update has basically doubled my traffic – and I was already reaching the upper limit of my 99$ plan. With this new traffic – I would be paying about 200$ / month – and considering the fact that baeldung is a personal blog – that’s a bit much.

2. The Migration and the Speed Test

To start off, I have moved one of my secondary sites over – www.craftycristian.com – to test the waters at Traffic Planet Hosting.

Now – the first thing I was curious about when considering the move was speed – since speed was one of the main selling points of WPEngine.

Keep in mind that WPEngine has a proprietary Caching/CDN solution – so using something standard such as the W3 Total Cache plugin was not an option. After the migration, I of course activated that plugin on my new installation. Also keep in mind that this is not load testing, just early numbers – I’ll follow up with additional data after my first full week of traffic.

Let’s jump right into the numbers – I measured the speed of 2 pages on my site – the homepage and an article page:

• on WPEngine
• on Traffic Planet Hosting without Caching
• on Traffic Planet Hosting with Caching
• Summary of Results

3. Speed On WPEngine

3.1. Homepage Speed on WPEngine

We’ll first look at the speed results of the homepage – starting with a traffic from Amsterdam:

Next – Dallas:

And finally – New York:

Obviously the WPEngine servers are in the United States, closer to New York than Dallas – overall, very respectable results.

3.2. Post Speed on WPEngine

Now that we covered the homepage, I picked the most visited post on the site to get some speed readings:

We’ll begin with Amsterdam:

Next – let’s look at the results from Dallas:

And finally – New York:

The WPEngine results are pretty consistent for the article page as well.

Now – let’s how the numbers change after the migration to Traffic Planet Hosting.

4. Speed On Traffic Planet Hosting without Caching

After the migration, I ran the exact same speed tests via Pindom – on the homepage and on the sample article (nothing else has been modified).

4.1. Homepage Speed on Traffic Planet

From Amsterdam:

Now – traffic from Dallas:

And from New York:

4.2. Post Speed on Traffic Planet

From Amsterdam:

From Dallas:

And from New York:

Overall, the results without caching are similar to the results I saw on WPEngine.

5. Speed On Traffic Planet Hosting with Cache Enabled

5.1. Homepage Speed on Traffic Planet with Caching

From Amsterdam:

From Dallas:

And from New York:

5.2. Article Speed on Traffic Planet with Caching

From Amsterdam:

From Dallas:

From New York:

6. Speed Summary

OK, let’s look at the data – starting with the Load Time of the page on WPEngine and then Traffic Planet with and without caching on:

Here we go – an overall ~15% speed increase from moving my sites – which is very nice to see.

7. Billing and Conclusion

A 15% speed increase is very good news – especially considering that this is on top of good numbers I was getting with WPEngine, but the main goal of the move wasn’t speed – but reducing my bill (which is getting uncomfortably large:

As you can see – I’m close to my 100.000 visits / month limit, and anything that goes over that is going to be charged extra. With my current traffic spike, baeldung alone is going to get just shy of 200.000 visits next month – which will result in a 200$ bill.

Here’s the interesting part – my bandwidth usage is not that high – it’s below 1GB / day:

And since the Traffic Planet Hosting plans are not based on Visits but on Bandwidth – I’m falling below even their 24$ / month plan – which at the time I’m writing this, is capped at 50 GB / month. That’s 8 times cheaper than what my next month will cost with WPEngine!

Now – I’m probably going to move to their 49$ plan – just to not worry about the traffic and bandwidth – which is still a good 4 times cheaper.

I mentioned at the very beginning of this article that I’m testing the waters with Traffic Planet Hosting. The water’s great!

The post WPEngine vs. Traffic Planet Hosting – Speed first appeared on Meta Baeldung.