How to buy a Website

When buying a website there are several things you will want to consider.

1) The domain name - any website that does not have a dot com extension is a waste of money. There are the few sucesses that are in the dot net realm, but very few. In general, you have already conceeded that you could not get a real website name and are less of a company than what a customer is looking for.

Anything less than a dot com will be ard to market and confusing to advertise. You also run the risk of the dot com owner capitalizing on your hardwork since most people will assume you are a dot com.

2) Traffic - How much traffic does a website get. Traffic is hard to get and can be very expensive and conversly traffic can be sold for considerable amounts of money. If your website generates 1000 viewers daily the traffic could be sold for five to ten cents per viewer to sites needing thoses viewers. That puts a relative value on 1000 uniques of about $50.

3) Hosting Cost - don't make a mistake about website costs. Hosting can be huge. Sites can cost thousands of dollars a month to operate. Having huge volumes of traffic will cost you. So you have an offset of traffic vs the income. It is not unusual for a website to cost $1,000.00/month if the site has high traffic.

4) Programing - many low end or inexpensive websites use freeware or open source programing. This programing can have security holes that may be exploited and destroy your website. Since the programing is openly available for download or sold to multiple customers, you will have many people aware of security holes. It is generally not a good idea to run programing when peple know how it works.

The other consideration is the processing capacity of the server.

It is most likely you will host your website on a shared server. This is done to save money and split a server between as many as 50 websites. Many companies limit processing time to prevent your site from hogging all the server resources and slowing down other websites. Having cgi, asp or jsp programing may require you to have a dedicated server if you have a resonable number of visitors. This will drive up the monthly cost by at leat $300 for the dedicated machine.

Sucessful websites with good programing can require even more power. Websites such as http://buzztrader.com run on machines with 4 xeon processors that cost more than a new SUV.

For a modern website to have sucess it will need some form of programing. The more people you have accessing the website, the more power and bandwidth you will need to run it.

It is also well known that open source programing is not built for high end websites.

For example, there are thousands of programs you can get for free or for a couple hundred dollars to run an online classified system. Most written by high school students or inexperianced programers. The programs are often very good and offer loads of features. What they often miss is the ability to manage high traffic due to inexperiance or poorly planned data structures and programing methods.

Some of the systems seem scalable, but if they exceed 500 or 1000 ads the system becomes slow and even crash when trying to search or manage ads. This would make the possibility of having 100,000 ads unatainable.

Having propritary programing is expensive, but if you are serious about making money, its the only real option. You do not want to invest time and money building a website, advertising and then find out it can not handle the load you have created. You business will sink like a rock.

If you buy a website with programing, you will want to have an expert evaluate it and determine what your cost and growth potential will be. You don't want to buy a honda civic to haul freight, it wont hold much and you will not be able to make money hauling bricks to construction sites in your trunk.

You don't have to be afraid that a website will cost you your house, but you shuld be aware that a sucessful site will cost much more than an average website and will require more hardware than an average website. If you are spending thousands of dollars on a website you should expect the costs to be considerable if the site is going to pay off.