Which technologies & budget for starting a Web2.0 website?

...or how to start a website targeted to generate high traffic?

[fabien7474]

Hello,

I have been reading these boards for a while now and I really appreciate the value of the contents and answers in this website.

I finally decide to write you a post here. I hope you will excuse my English mistakes.

Few months ago, I got an idea so good that I convinced myself to start up my online business based on this concept. I quit my job and, starting from September, I will be working 110% time on this project. (today I can spend only 10 hours a week on prospecting tasks). My initial plan is to launch a Beta version in February 2010.

My future website will be of a mix of articles, Web2.0 capabilities (social networking, AJAX use, votes, user created contents, forums) and a lot of statistics reporting (that will require many queries to the database). The business model will be mainly based on high traffic and advertising revenues. Actually, the first objective is traffic before generating revenues.

Since I am a newbie in the online business (although I have been always working in the Computer industry), it is very difficult for me to estimate the startup costs for building and designing my web site. Moreover, I cannot make my choice on the starting technology (CMS (Joomla or Drupal) or not? PHP, Java, ASP.NET, Python, Rails, Grails ?...).

I have already identified major points that I want for my website. That is:

Performance : I am aiming to have a very high traffic during few hours. I need therefore, to build, from the start, a website that can support easily 100K Unique Visitor/day, and of course, I should have a scalable architecture for higher traffic.

Light (but interesting) content : I do not see an added-value in integrating heavy contents (like Flash or videos) into my first version of web-site

Intensive Marketing: let's be clear. If I want my website to be valuable for the visitors, there is a break-even point in traffic, at which contents will be credible enough. For instance, a web site like digg is useless if it is generating only few hundred visitors a day with little activity

So, now, my questions are:

What technology do you advise me for starting up? Is Joomla, for instance, optimized enough for my needs ?

Once the technology chosen, how can I estimate the budget required for starting such a website? Do you know a method for estimating building and designing costs?

Do you know the initial budget and technologies for websites like digg.com, stackoverflow.com or imdb.com ? Are the production costs disclosed somewhere ? Where can I find out this kind of information ?

I know, there are a lot of questions, so if you answer me for only one of them I will really appreciate it.

Thank you for reading this post up to this point and thank you in advance for your future answers.

Regards,

Fabien.

[Leosghost]

Bienvenue fabien7474 :)

I would suggest that you split your questions

Moreover, I cannot make my choice on the starting technology (CMS (Joomla or Drupal) or not? PHP, Java, ASP.NET, Python, Rails, Grails ?...).

And repost sections of it to the various areas of WebmasterWorld ( forums , php, asp etc ) that deal with the specifics in order to get specialist well informed opinions

Again welcome to WebmasterWorld :)

[fabien7474]

Thank you. I have split part of this post and send it to the "Website Technology Issues [webmasterworld.com]" category.

[edited by: phranque at 11:39 am (utc) on Aug. 10, 2009]
[edit reason] added link [/edit]