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Would it be more cost effective for a small business (around 25 concurrent users) to buy a PAF database and code it up ourselves or use a Postcode service such as Postcode Anywhere?
The Royal Mail site is really confusing! http://www.royalmail.com/marketing-services/address-management-unit/address-data-products/postcode-address-file-paf/prices
We operate 24 hours a day and at any one time, we have between 1 and 25 users doing postcode searches. We are currently using a PAYG service and it is really pricey so we want to buy a PAF database and create our own. I don't understand the pricing on the link above (basically we're looking at something in the region of £2 to £49,500?!)
Also, what do you actually get with a PAF database? As in what kind of files do they send you, is there an API and do you pay a one off fee or an ongoing fee? Do you have to agree to the delete the data once you stop paying royal mail?
Thanks
For the time it would take to code it up yourselves, it would be more time and cost efficient to go with someone like Postcode Anywhere. They'll also provide guaranteed first class service along with service updates to improve service.
We use them on a lesser-scale (after moving from QAS which were crap in comparison).
Have you investigated pricing with any providers yet - if so, what's it coming out at?
I can't add anymore to the answer by Alan, which describes how the files are provided and how it needs to be done.
You get a bunch of flat files and need to use the PAF programmers guide to help build yourself a system
http://www.royalmail.com/marketing-services/address-management-unit/address-data-products/programmers-guide
See also
www royalmail.com/sites/default/files/docs/pdf/01_tell_me_the_basics.pdf
www royalmail.com/pafnews
You're probably better off buying some package www poweredbypaf.com/
You don't need to purchase the Royal Mail Postcode Address File (PAF). There are lots of API's available.
getAddress.io is the only one I've found that's free:
https://getAddress.io
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How could a company's first technical employee (or a consultant) integrate cloud service costs into the company budget? My thinking is that when you build "serverless" or "autoscaling" services the company may ask
How much will this cost? $10/month? $1,000/month?
and it seems unclear how to manage those costs.
If we just do an example. Let's say I build a Heroku or Cloud Run (GCP) hosted dashboard, or a simple web app using Firebase. Who pays for it? I don't want company tools to run out of my credit card for obvious reasons.
Make sure you have technical solution of your problem.
Then, find out the size of your data in each request. How much bandwidth you will use? Where you will store the data? How much CPU you will use? etc.
Based on this extrapolate your cost for whole month.
Based on that you can use GCP calculator https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator
I would recommend to start with one of the major cloud providers free plans, for example in AWS you can open free account for 12 month and you can start building your serverless code, create api, store data and much more. after getting confidence with your solution you can present it to your company and decide later if they want to continue with payable usage or not.
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We have an email server running postfix on AWS m1.medium instance. We push out roughly 150,000 emails a week (30,000 emails a day). We do not want to use Amazon SES for some business reasons. It usually takes more than 2 hours for each day's send and we want to reduce this. What suggestions do you have in terms of increasing the AWS instance type / class? There is a number of instance classes and we cannot figure out which class / type would be ideal for our situation. Any suggestions?
For your use case, instance size probably does not matter. 30,000 emails over a two hour period is not a lot either of terms of CPU, disk or network requirements.
Most likely you will see improvements by better overlapping of email send requests. This can be accomplished thru software design improvements, or simply splitting your sends via multiple EC2 instances.
Of course I am making a lot of assumptions here as you did not provide any statistics on what you are sending, etc.
Since you didn't specify any specifics, I presume that this is some kind of customer relationship thing (newsletter, etc), which will send lots of similar, or even identical emails (bulk emailing).
The problem you're inevitable going to run with in is, your mails getting classified / treated as unsolicited. The symptom you describe as
It usually takes more than 2 hours for each day's send and we want to reduce this.
Sounds a lot like greylisting and/or tarpitting to me. If this is actually the issue, then except making your bulk email look less like spam and your mail delivery system behave like a dumb mass mailer there's little you can do about it.
See also this Q&A: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/19170
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Our website is an eCommerce store trading in ethically sourced loose diamonds. We do not get much traffic and yet our Amazon bill is huge ($300/month for 1,500 unique visits). Is this normal?
I do know we are daily doing some database pulling twice from another source and that the files are large. Does it make sense to just use regular hosting for this process and then the Amazon one just for our site?
Most of the cost is for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. About 20% is for RDS service.
I am wondering if:
(a) our developers have done something which leads to this kind of usage OR
(b) Amazon is just really expensive
IS THERE A PAID FOR SERVICE WHICH WE CAN USE TO ENSURE OUR SITE IS OPTIMISED FOR ITS HOSTING - in terms of cost, usage and speed?
It should probably cost you around 30-50 dollars a month. 300 seems higher than necessary.
for 1500 vistors, you can get away with using an m1.small instance most likely
I'd say check out the AWS trusted advisor service that will tell you about your utilization and where you can optimize your usage, but you can only get that with AWS Business support (100/month). However considering your way over what is expected, it might be worth looking into
Trusted advisor will inform you of quite a few things:
cost optimization
security
fault tolerance
performance
I've generally found it to be one of the most useful additions to my AWS infrastructure.
Additionally if you were to sign up for Business support, not only do you get trusted advisor, but you can ask questions directly to the support staff via chat, email, or phone. Would also be quite useful to help you pinpoint your problem areas.
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Well, I would like to build a file hosting website just like other already did, but it is going to be something different by adding search engine, allowing download and upload in full speed for any user, and so on. Unfortunately the web hosting plans, which declared to support UNLIMITED SPACE rarely allows me to host files on those space. So what I need is the unlimited file storage service which could host all of my users' files.
I found Amazon S3, already provides such service, but could anybody recommends me for other better ?
No storage is really unlimited. Depending on how much space you'll need, this could get very expensive.
I don't want to hammer good ideas, but if I understand correctly, you want to build a hosting service, yet you want to 'rent' the disk space and bandwidth. Which means - in other words - you want to outsource a part of the core business. Which is the fastest way to kill your business.
Everyone - you rent from - will put their profit in the price you get, so it is possible to create a service this way, it would just be too expensive to sell.
I suggest you put spreadsheet together, where you calculate this service, like you would build it up piece by piece. Calculate the needed disk space (amount of disks), bandwidth, servers, and you will realize that with even 1000 user online you would need a smaller data center.
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We need an address finder (premise level) based on postcode. We have a budget of 40k for this. But I have been assigned to find some cheaper alternatives for Royal mail PAF database. Is Google any good to find premise level address when you send full postcode. Any recommendation over Royal Mail PAF file. Any web services out there for this to accomplish? Please share your knowledge.
Cheers,
Naren
We use products from AFD for this, they work well for us.
Edit just saw Best way to geocode UK postcode with Google Maps API? on the front page.
In the UK the government has said that PAF data should be made free[1]. I'm painfully aware of the almost extortionate nature that Royal Mail operate.
Having worked with Royal Mail PAF API, I known a 'friend' (wink wink) that created a class wrapper around the APIs. This 'friend' of mine built a custom Importer that automatically ripped all the PAF data into a MS SQL database. Post the data import, he no longer needs to renew he's licences because he is no longer using PAF data.
This may be something you could do also, buy the data one time an import it.
As for data changes, you can buy perhaps every few years e.g. 2-3 years and do a update of your existing data.
[1] Damn It! guess I was wrong, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/22/postcode-petition-fails-blocked-number-ten
I work as the integrations specialist for Postcode Anywhere (we are one of the leading Royal Mail PAF resellers). Address capture doesn’t have to be expensive – and you don’t have to sacrifice reliability for an affordable service. Postcode Anywhere can be licensed either on a simple credit pack based system or on an annual basis, and you can be up and running in 10 minutes using our JavaScript client. If you are looking to create a more bespoke integration we also have an array of web services and code samples to help you.
If you want to have a play around with the service to see what you think we will be more than happy to provide you with a free trial. A full run-down of all of our products and services can be found here: http://www.postcodeanywhere.co.uk/products.
I work for CraftyClicks.
There are a few PAF resellers around. The data is all the same, prices can vary significantly. Best to spend a few minutes browsing the various sites.
At CraftyClicks our focus is on uptime/availability and keeping the price of PAF data reasonable - at high volumes the price falls to well below 1 penny a click.
Our address lookup web service can be integrated client side via JavaScript or server side via XML.
Let us know your requirements (adam at craftyclicks.co.uk) - you shouldn't be spending anywhere near 40k for this!
Adam.
The base PAF data is the same but a lot of value is put into adding information that is not included into PAF to help with realtime and batch addressing matching with products based on PAF. We have a lot of locality information that is not included within PAF but people tend to use within their address.
As to updates, there are thousands of changes every month so its vital that you use a source that has regular updates to the PAF data and also associated files such as business and consumer names data that also help in the matching process.
Have a look at our site www.capscan.com for both UK and International data quality with services delivered either installed or as a web service.
You can also contact us on 0207 428 1255