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Help me assess my situation and make an informed choice

L

locowolf

New Member
My partner and I are set to publish a website we've been developing for a year. It's a somewhat satirical, entertainment-based website that will examine films, anime and other facets of popular culture from a unique perspective. Our goal is to eventually be profitable through advertising. We feel we're sitting on a great product and want to maximize its potential by making sound technical and business decisions.

We won't need much space (50mb would suffice) but since it's an advertising-driven site we expect to see a lot of traffic, so bandwidth is key. Lots and lots of bandwidth. There are 12 primary pages on the site, with the average page download size being roughly 110kb. 10 or even 20 GB/month probably won't do. That we have enough bandwidth to cultivate a fairly extensive userbase at the outset is critical.

Keep in mind: My parter and I have no experience running websites. Any advanced knowledge necessary to administrate a dedicated server (or whatever the case may be) will not be availabe. I'm an experienced programmer and fairly intuitive in all matters computer related, but please, nothing too complicated!!

We have a fixed budget and are prepared to pay in the area of $200 a month for hosting.

Some of my other concerns:

Server can also have no obscure ethical reservations as the writing on the site is sometimes crude and/or vulgar.

PHP is a must. Must be no restrictions on file reading/writing access by scripts in whatever directory the site is placed. (something in my PHP text lead me to believe this might be an issue)

I've been testing the site with Apache on my Win98 system and it works brilliantly. Does it follow that it will work the same way on whichever server I choose?

We've like to put the site online stat, within 1 or 2 weeks.

Advice?

Thanx,
locowolf
sschroeder81@earthlink.net:eek:
 
If you're not looking into dedicated solutions (maybe by hiring a part time sys admin), then take a look at our hosting packages.

"PHP is a must. Must be no restrictions on file reading/writing access by scripts in whatever directory the site is placed. (something in my PHP text lead me to believe this might be an issue)"

Request us a phpinfo page if you're insterested. We pretty much allow everything for a developer to run their scripts; however, safe_mode is on and scripts such as exe.php?exec=ls%20-al is not allowed.

Your php scripts should work the same on Wins platforum or NIX platform. It also depends on specific server optimization which can maximize the performance of one's site.

We have PHP, Phyton, CGI, mySQL supported. Though we do compile apache::asp but it's not a wise idea to run ASP application on Unix machines even Chillisoft is installed.

As for web stats, you can run your own monitoring system on our server. By default, we have Webalizer and Awstats installed for each domain name.

Take a look at our packages at http://www.cyberservers.net. The biggest plan we have on the site is 75GB transfer for $65.99 per month. If you ever need more, drop us an email.
 
$200 per month for a webhosting might be too much unless you are looking into a dedicated server. If the site works with apache, it should work with apache server regardless of OS. There are some good hosts, feel free to look around in the offer forum.
 
Originally posted by Daniel
Get a managed dedicated box.
Click to expand...

Allthough they have the money for it, I feel they really don't need it.

My suggestion: find a host where you can grow. Some hosts offer both shared as dedicated. In the beginning you won't need a lot of DATA TRANSFER (bandwidth is a different story) ... as soon as your traffic grows, you can upgrade to better plans.

Please note: you want to create a commercial website (you were talking about advertising): the kind of site you like to setup is not very popular with advertisers and/or advertising services like doubleclick or fastclick or any other service. First of all, entertainment sites have very low click through rates, secondly ... you said the site can be rude or offensive ... trust me, most advertisers do not wish to advertise on pages like that. It is a smart thing to start slow and see if and how you can grow and how your advertisment plans fit in. The advertisment business is very slow these days and it would be very unwise to spend a lot of money on something you can't earn back or support with your website revenue.

Good luck!
 
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