This is the second in a series of articles about Broker/Agent Real Estate Websites.  (first article here). Budget will drive this selection .

Considerations include:

• Power -Ram Size and number of cores
• Reliability -Uptime, Security
• Support -Managed?
• Backup

Is a dedicated server required?  You could reduce costs without a dedicated server, but customization is limited in a shared environment.  I use a few apache modules that I consider important but are not in a standard install including google’s modpagespeed and additional PHP Libs like APC etc..

As for support, I do not make many tech support calls – but when I do, I really need to count on an expert being available for immediate assistance.  For Back-end Management,  I have used Parrallels Plesk Panel, but I have a strong perference towards WHM/cPanel.  To me, Plesk was just not intuitive (it takes me a long time to figure stuff out not)

For backup?  Consider disaster recovery -how many man hours would it take to rebuild your enviroment in the case of a non-recoverable crash? I pay for daily backups.

I will say that, I have tried several different hosting services/solutions, and perhaps there are cheaper or better solutions but from my experience liguid web is an easy choice. Top notch support, reliability and computing power. Check them, let me how they rank with your choices.

Ok after adding in a CDN and the RETs feed, this has become quite an investment. My opinion on this is if you want compete with the industry leaders,  you need to offer something different, something better, something faster.  You can’t compete if you have frequent outages or slow response times.

Next pulling this all together -the results. Was it worth it?