Got my Stuff from Customs
December 12th, 2011 by KenricCustoms
My shipment was cleared the day after my last post. I guess they wanted to open up the shipment to make sure that it was what my paperwork said it was. Everything being imported is taxed at a certain rate. The rate depends on what you are importing and what country it comes from. It’s a complicated decision process that my customs company determines. I pay about 9% on my product.
US Customs opened up one box in each palette and they also took one of the products I guess for sampling? So I only got 749 out of my 750 pieces. I don’t know if they are allowed to do that, but it’s really a small cost. Just having customs decide that they wanted to inspect my shipment cost me $400 more in transportation and storage charges. I guess that’s just part of doing business.
Servers
One of my stores went down 3 times last Friday and is going down probably 3 times a day now. Each outage ranges from 10 minutes to 30 minutes which sucks. Of course, this is 100% my fault so I don’t harp on it. The irony is that this isn’t even the store that I wanted to move over to the dedicated server last month. That store has only gone down twice in the past weekend.
With a dedicated server costing a minimum of $150 a month, I have to figure if my downtime is costing me more than that. Right now, I don’t think so. A dedicated server would cost me $1800 a year. So the big question is, am I losing out on $1800 worth of profit during the downtime of my stores? $1800 is about 35-50 orders. Right now I don’t think I’m losing money based on the outage times, but if I go down much more often this week then I probably will be.
There are other benefits such as site speed and good neighborhood SEO in a dedicated server. I know that I will eventually have to do this, but once I get past Xmas I can wait until September 2012 to do it.
Posted in Ebiz | 2 Comments »
Stumble it!
It is probably too late now, and I’m probably wrong anyway, but is it possible to cluster by getting another virtual server just for the busy period, and to run them both with a round-robin DNS config, and then to back out back to a single virtual server after the seasonal panic is over? It would be necessary to have both virtual servers share the same SQL back-end (for stock level lookups etc). I guess it depends if your shop & cart software support this load balance cluster config.
By Ambition on Dec 13, 2011
Kenric:
I am pretty happy with Hostgator’s VPS, which costs me $50 a month. It has passed the Black Friday with about 15K unique visitors a day for straight 4 days.
I would not move on to Dedicated server unless you can easily cover the cost for your traffic and orders.
Good luck to your Christmas seasons!
By Terence Chang on Dec 13, 2011