Forum Moderators: mack
I'm new here, thus i hope no one will be annoyed by my questions. I have searched google for a while now, trying to find some answers to these questions, but to no avail.
Anyways, im thinking of opening a social networking website for my community. i am assuming that about 10,000-15,000 people would become members and maybe 3,000-5,000 members/visitors a day. I am not charging anything for the members, but i dont want to pull money out of my pocket for hosting charges. I would like to have streaming video and pictures on the site, so that might take up some space and bandwith. The questions i have
1. what kind of a server/host company should i look for?
2. how much would that cost?
3. How much would i be able to generate from ads? and what company/add would be best suited for a social networking website
4. Anyone know how metacafe makes enough money to pay for their content? would i be able to do such a thing in a small scale
thank you very much for any possible answers and happy upcoming holiday season to all.
Server Issues
I'm not sure how you're coming up with those numbers, but let's assume that the 5,000 visitors per day is correct. That could be served up from a cheap shared server or could require a lot more. From a server standpoint, what matters is page views, page weight and peak load. Also, realistically, are you going to be running with 10,000 members right from day one (i.e. are you basically creating a site with an existing membership base who will automatically become site members?). If not, you may be able to ramp up hosting costs as your site grows.
Depending on how all that shakes out, you can probably start out with a cheap shared hosting package ($7/month) supplemented by Amazon S3 services, move up to a "virtual private server"/"semi-dedicated server" for about $50/month (basically a reserved portion of a server that gives you a significant portion of the resources, but is not dedicated). If the site does in fact catch on and become successful, you could bump up to a dedicated server ($150/mo to sky is the limit - I just spoke to someone with a download-intensive site who spends $7,000/month on hosting).
Page views. On a normal content site that has enough pages to be interesting, I get averages per visitor of about 6-7 pages with peak load only being about double low load. That's a pretty easy load. It's a low-traffic site (15,000 uniques per month) and is not even close to maxing out my shared account (which actually also runs a small networking site of sorts, a couple of other things). If on the other hand, your site revolves around something that your community likely needs/wants to know first thing in the morning, involves looking at lots of pages, and the audience is all in one time zone, you could have 10 page requests per second (think about 5,000 visitors, 60% of them online from 8am-9am, each requesting 12 pages = 36K/hr = 10 page views per second).
Page "weight" in terms of server load has two factors: size in bytes, which is primarily a bandwidth issue, but does affect server load as well, and the processing power required to generate that page. It's conceivable to have a low-bandwidth site that has zillions of database queries and tons of data crunching to generate a page, so that even though you would look like a small site in terms of page views and bandwidth, you would still exceed the limits of a shared server.
Social networking sites often require a lot of processing power because of all the relationships they map. Markus Frind (? the guy who runs Plenty of Fish) has a lot about this on his blog and how his big edge is that he has super-efficient, custom software running his dating site. That, he says, is the difference between hi making and losing money. Again, it's not the bandwidth, it's the backend CPU power. Brett has talked a lot about this being the big bottleneck for WebmasterWorld as well and for similar reasons. Personally, I have seriously slowed things down with one bad function. It can save you a lot of money if you profile your code to reduce the most "expensive" operations.
In terms of serving video without investing in infrastructure, this came up recently in another thread here and there was a lot of praise for using Amazon's S3 service which basically lets you pay for bandwidth as you go. That way you don't have to buy $1000/month worth of capacity for the rare days when one of your videos goes viral. That way you can use a cheaper hosting setup until you see how things are going, whether you'll really get those 10,000 members and 5,000 visits per day and, most importantly, how much if anything those visits are worth to advertisers. To wit...
How much can you make from Ads?
Is your site
a) a networking site for people who's goal is to cut back on their expenses so that they can live on less than $10,000/year (and yes, I know several such people in the US and yes, they do have net access and laptops and usually lots of climbing gear, surfboards or skis/snowboards).
b)a social networking site for people who do professional snow removal and are interested in the latest equipment?
c) a networking site for people who have a class-action suit pending?
