There are three options for hosting the OpenX Ad Server: hosting it yourself, opening an account at OpenX Hosted, or outsourcing the hosting to a specialized company
Once you’ve decided that you want to start using the OpenX Ad Server, the next important decision is: where and how do I host my OpenX Ad Server?
There are basically three options:
- hosting it yourself on your own site or server
- opening an account at OpenX Hosted
- outsourcing the hosting to a specialist company
Below, I will discuss all three options and the pros and cons of each. As is so often the case, every situation will have it’s own characteristics, so there is no single answer to the questions of where to host OpenX. I hope that you will be able to make your own decision based on the information presented here.
Factors to keep in mind: costs, flexibility, scalability and peace of mind
When making the decision about where and how to host your OpenX system, there are a number of factors to keep in mind: costs, flexibility, scalability and peace of mind.
Nowadays, costs seem to be the only aspect that people consider. That’s understandable, because it’s very easy to quantify and compare them. It can be appealing to look for the least expensive solution in the short term, but in the long term that could result in unexpected expenses and worries.
Hosting OpenX Ad Server on your own site or server
Since OpenX Ad Server is a free open source system that can be downloaded from the OpenX.org website, it is easy to just download it and install it on your own server. If you consider going to self hosting or having it hosted by a specialist company, I do recommend that you have an evaluation copy setup first, to get better acquainted with the software and its functionality.
The costs for hosting your own OpenX Ad Server might be negligible, especially if you have plenty of disk space and bandwidth left in your hosting plan. If you know how to install a PHP/MySQL application, and are willing to follow the guidance in the installation instructions, you won’t be needing any help, which would provide great flexibility. You will need to take care of backups and upgrades yourself. When your site’s traffic begins to grow, so will the ad server, and that might result in a need for scaling. Setting up the ad server with scalability in mind is always a good idea. Hosting your own ad server does mean you will also be responsible for problem solving, recovering from failures, and generally will mean that you’re the one worrying about it. So peace of mind in this scenario will be low.
Hosting your own OpenX Ad Server is a good plan if you know your PHP and MySQL, are willing to spend a bit of time setting up and configuring the software, and are ready to perform upgrades at regular intervals. You should also have sufficient disk space and bandwidth in your hosting plan. If this sounds like too much of a burden, it might be wise to consider the option mentioned below, that is to open an account at OpenX Hosted.
Opening a free account at OpenX Community Hosted
In 2008, the OpenX.org company that develops the OpenX Ad Server software started offering a service that they call “OpenX Community Hosted”. They’ve created a huge OpenX Ad Server installation and you can request an account on this system. Using OpenX Community Hosted is free or charge, for anyone serving up to 100 million ad impressions per month. If you have or expect to have more than 100 million ad impressions per month, they also offer a variety called ‘OpenX Enterprise Hosted’, which is not free and is effectively a form of outsourcing the hosting that I will discuss below.
When it comes to costs, you can’t beat OpenX Community Hosted, since it is free. It is pretty agile and flexible too: Opening an account and getting started is easy, and you can probably serve your first ads within hours of requesting the account. If you are migrating from your own OpenX setup to OpenX Community Hosted, do keep in mind that there are no import facilities, so you will have to go in and manually create all of your inventory in your OpenX Community Hosted account. And then you’ll have to replace the invocation code in your sites to the new zones created in OpenX Community Hosted. Likewise, moving away again from OpenX Community Hosted to another hosting provider will require manual work again, since there is no export facility either. In addition, when you go for OpenX Community Hosted you will not be able to use the plugin and API architecture. Anything related to scalability is taken care of by OpenX, and they increase their server platform with the growth in demand for the service. You will not have to worry about software upgrades, database backups, server monitoring, or anything related to disaster recovery preparations, so peace of mind is almost a given.
When you’re a publisher running one site or a small set of sites, will stay below the threshold of 100 million ad impressions per month, can live with just forum support, and don’t require anything like API access of plugins, OpenX Community Hosted might be a very good option at a very attractive price.
Outsourcing the hosting of OpenX Ad Server
Another option to consider is to outsource the hosting of your OpenX Ad Server to a company that specializes in hosting medium size or large PHP/MySQL applications. Just like with regular web or application hosting, there are numerous hosting providers that could provide this service, and picking the best one for your situation might not be an easy job.
OpenX Enterprise Hosted
As mentioned above, OpenX Community Hosted is a free service for anyone displaying less than 100 million ad impressions per month. If you go over that volume but still want to stay with OpenX as a provider, you can go with their paid service called OpenX Enterprise Hosted. Since it is operated by the very same people that developed the software, you should be expecting top notch service and unmatched expertise. OpenX Enterprise Hosted will be installed on dedicated hardware and it has a guaranteed uptime of 99.75%. But it does come with a pretty big price tag.
OpenX Enterprise Hosted starts at US$ 999 per month for a volume of 100 million ad impressions per month. Calculating that back to a price per 1 million ad impressions, you’re paying about US$ 10 per 1 million impressions depending on your actual volume. There are no costs for setup or bandwidth. More information and a comparison table are posted on the OpenX website.
In my opinion, the costs for OpenX Hosted Enterprise are rather high. It does mean, however, that you buy peace of mind, assuming you trust OpenX as your hosting provider. Scalability is automatically included in the deal. And since it will be your own dedicated setup, you get the flexibility that comes with that.
Specialized hosting provider
OpenX Ad Server is ‘just’ a PHP/MySQL application, but you might find that your hosting provider does not know the software or doesn’t know it well enough. If you intend to stay with the hosting provider that you know and trust, it might be a good idea bringing in an OpenX expert to help you and your provider with the initial setup and configuration, and to be available for additional consulting afterwards. Most of the work involved in hosting OpenX Ad Server from a technical perspective has to do with fine tuning the hardware and operating system, web server, database server and network. Hosting providers should have these skills in house, it’s just the little bit of extra expertise about the specifics of OpenX that is missing.
If you ask for a quote from a hosting provider, they will probably not be able to formulate a price per 1 million ad impressions, especially if they don’t have experience running OpenX. It is most likely that they will quote you for the server setup and the bandwidth. However, it might be hard to figure out how big a server you will need and how much bandwidth you will consume. For instance, the bandwidth will be different when you host the ads for your advertisers yourself versus a situation where the ads are actually hosted externally by the advertisers or their agencies. You will need to convert a cost per gigabyte of bandwidth into a cost per 1 million impressions. In some of the larger OpenX systems I’ve worked with, I’ve found that the bandwidth can vary between 120,000 and 200,000 impressions per gigabyte, but this is from a very limited number of systems. I’m considering to do a client survey to find out what their numbers are.
You might be able to find providers that are willing to offer this kind of hosting for incredibly low prices. As said in the introduction, though, costs should not be the only factor in making a decision like this. When you work with an experience and professional hosting provider, you should also be able to agree on the flexibility that is needed for your scenario, just like scalabilty. Outsourcing the hosting of any application should mean you also outsource the worrying about it, and that should result in peace of mind for you.
Making your decision
Based on the options presented and discussed above, you will have to weigh all of the pros and cons and make your own decision. There is not a single decision that’s right for everyone.
One scenario is to start with hosting the ad server yourself, but configuring it in such a way that you have a growth path and are able to migrate to an outsourced solution in the future. That will give you the benefit of low costs in the short term, but also the flexibility to migrate to an outsourced situation in the long term and take care of the scalability requirements. Putting in a little bit of thinking and planning will give you peace of mind that you’ve made the right decision and are ready to meet the demands of your site’s growth if and when it happens.
If you’re interested in discussing your situation and plans with me, to find out what the best hosting option would be in your case, please feel free to contact me for support.
Update: pricing for OpenX Enterprise Hosted has changed, and I’ve updated the pricing details on this page accordingly.
