The logistics of running a website?

[Jeffy]

I have a few specific questions about the logistics of running a website.

(The following is purely hypothetical)
Assuming I would plan to build a website about frogs. On that site, people could upload pictures of their frogs (or submit them) which then are posted in a blog-like format. Similar to this website: http://cuteoverload.com/.
The functions would encompass a news-blog functionality and perhaps the ability for people to register and create an account on the site (not a forum account) on which they can view their submitted photos and the like.

Now I have several questions about this scenario:

1. Logistical

1- Assuming the site would have around 100 photos submitted by people per day, what hardware do I have to rent to support that traffic? (storage space)
2- What are the specific differences between renting a webspace and renting a "box"? I assume box means renting a complete dedicated box and the former being a smaller part of a box.
3- What would the average running costs be? Rough estimates for American or Western European hosting.


2. Business

1- Assuming I call my site "frogsite.com", do I own the rights to the name of that site once I grab the domain name or is there extra legal work needed to copyright that name? And what if someone owns "frogsite.com" already and I grab "frogsite.net"? Would that be considered hostile or illegal? And if that person trademarked his site?
2- Assuming I would hire someone to create that site, in what price range would I be in? (Not asking for an exact quote, only trying to approximate in what ballpark it would be in). This assumes average pricing for western europe/USA based companies.

[tracknut]

1. Logistical

1- Assuming the site would have around 100 photos submitted by people per day, what hardware do I have to rent to support that traffic? (storage space)
2- What are the specific differences between renting a webspace and renting a "box"? I assume box means renting a complete dedicated box and the former being a smaller part of a box.
3- What would the average running costs be? Rough estimates for American or Western European hosting.

1- Let's say each image is 50Kb (and you'd better be resizing them during the upload - who knows what someone might submit). That's 5MB per day, and 1.8GB per year. Purchase your web hosting accordingly.
2- You can rent a "shared server" where you and other folks are on it, or a "dedicated server" which is yours alone. Cost is vastly different, and for what you're suggesting, unless frogs are more popular than I know, I would use a shared server until such time as your hosting company complains.
3- US hosting between $4-$6/month, no idea about EU

2. Business

1- Assuming I call my site "frogsite.com", do I own the rights to the name of that site once I grab the domain name or is there extra legal work needed to copyright that name? And what if someone owns "frogsite.com" already and I grab "frogsite.net"? Would that be considered hostile or illegal? And if that person trademarked his site?
2- Assuming I would hire someone to create that site, in what price range would I be in? (Not asking for an exact quote, only trying to approximate in what ballpark it would be in). This assumes average pricing for western europe/USA based companies.

[/quote]
1- Pretty much you grab the domain name and you use it, but I'm not a lawyer. If you've got the frogsite.com domain, it would seem completely not useful for someone else to start using the name "frogsite.com" when it points to you. Using frogsite.net would typically be a it tacky IF frogsite.com was a similar site to yours. If the other site was selling frog pillows, then no issue with your photo site.
2- Dunno

Dave

[teedoff]

A frog-blog? I like it...lol

As far as price. Depends on whether you are fine with a CMS type site like wordpress, which is very good at blog type sites, or you want a fully customized website designed from the ground up complete with an admin section for maintanence and database to handle all those images and other data. You could be looking at as little as $500 for a simple WP site, on up to several thousand dollars for a custom site. As tracknut said, its really hard to ballpark something like this until you sit down and scope out your site needs and particulars.

[Jeffy]

1- Let's say each image is 50Kb (and you'd better be resizing them during the upload - who knows what someone might submit). That's 5MB per day, and 1.8GB per year. Purchase your web hosting accordingly.

So would it be safe to rent 3GB of shared hosting with "unlimited" traffic for around 8€ per month? And is "unlimited" traffic actually unlimited? I mean if all of a sudden my site is overrun by a horde of 1 million users per month, will "unlimited" still apply?

You could be looking at as little as $500 for a simple WP site, on up to several thousand dollars for a custom site. As tracknut said, its really hard to ballpark something like this until you sit down and scope out your site needs and particulars.

I am wondering about a few things in regards to this:

1. How much space does the actual code for such a site take up? (All html + css +php +whatnot). And does that somehow bloat in size if I would get 1 million users? Will a MySQL database swell to uncontrollable size?
2. Are there any other considerations to make if the scale (amount of visitors, uploads, created accounts) suddenly increases a lot? Aside from the storage space and traffic. Does existing code handle large volumes of visitors just as well as small amounts?

What I am basically wondering is wether and how much the existing code for a site (frogsite example) has to "grow" with the large audience. As in, are there any hidden traps in a sudden increase in audience. Can I for example simply buy more space as needed and be completely oblivious about other things.

[tracknut]

So would it be safe to rent 3GB of shared hosting with "unlimited" traffic for around 8€ per month? And is "unlimited" traffic actually unlimited? I mean if all of a sudden my site is overrun by a horde of 1 million users per month, will "unlimited" still apply?

"Unlimited" anything is a marketing scam, and personally I take a very critical view of any vendor that is promising such things. No, they cannot deliver service to your 1 million customers, and they will come up with some clause in their agreement that allows them to not deliver the "unlimited bandwidth". But the model you should take is to start small with hosting. It is relatively easy, though expensive to upgrade to a dedicated server, so while you're small, pay small money, and only pay for the big volume if you do get to the point of those 1 million users/month.

I am wondering about a few things in regards to this:

1. How much space does the actual code for such a site take up? (All html + css +php +whatnot). And does that somehow bloat in size if I would get 1 million users? Will a MySQL database swell to uncontrollable size?
2. Are there any other considerations to make if the scale (amount of visitors, uploads, created accounts) suddenly increases a lot? Aside from the storage space and traffic. Does existing code handle large volumes of visitors just as well as small amounts?

What I am basically wondering is wether and how much the existing code for a site (frogsite example) has to "grow" with the large audience. As in, are there any hidden traps in a sudden increase in audience. Can I for example simply buy more space as needed and be completely oblivious about other things.

The code and what-not will be relatively small, and relatively constant, as compared to your photos in this example.

As to whether your code should "grow" with the scale, yes that's a trade-off you will need to make. Zipping together a quick and dirty version of frog-blog that supports the first 50 customers could be done cheaply and inefficiently, but still work. But when you hit large volumes you may look back and wish you'd spent big bucks to do it right. Unfortunately, most of us don't have the vision to know for sure that a site will take off like you suggest, so spending big money to support hordes of customers just in case they do show up, isn't too appealing. So personally (I'm repeating a theme I guess), I'd size to your realistic expectations first, presuming that if you suddenly hit big-time, you may need somewhat of a re-write for high volume.

Dave

[CodeGeek83]

"Unlimited" anything is a marketing scam, and personally I take a very critical view of any vendor that is promising such things. No, they cannot deliver service to your 1 million customers, and they will come up with some clause in their agreement that allows them to not deliver the "unlimited bandwidth". But the model you should take is to start small with hosting. It is relatively easy, though expensive to upgrade to a dedicated server, so while you're small, pay small money, and only pay for the big volume if you do get to the point of those 1 million users/month.



The code and what-not will be relatively small, and relatively constant, as compared to your photos in this example.

As to whether your code should "grow" with the scale, yes that's a trade-off you will need to make. Zipping together a quick and dirty version of frog-blog that supports the first 50 customers could be done cheaply and inefficiently, but still work. But when you hit large volumes you may look back and wish you'd spent big bucks to do it right. Unfortunately, most of us don't have the vision to know for sure that a site will take off like you suggest, so spending big money to support hordes of customers just in case they do show up, isn't too appealing. So personally (I'm repeating a theme I guess), I'd size to your realistic expectations first, presuming that if you suddenly hit big-time, you may need somewhat of a re-write for high volume.

Dave

From my experience it`s ALWAYS smaller than you expect...

[Hannykaahs]

Using frogsite.net would typically be a it tacky IF frogsite.com was a similar site to yours. If the other site was selling frog pillows, then no issue with your photo site.
Dave

Actually, just because you may have frogsite.com does not keep anyone else from grabbing frogsite.net or any other extension. And they can do whatever they want with it, even copy your site. That's why some companies buy the .net and .org of their domain, to keep anyone else from using them.

[Martikiha]

Actually, just because you may have frogsite.com does not keep anyone else from grabbing frogsite.net or any other extension. And they can do whatever they want with it, even copy your site. That's why some companies buy the .net and .org of their domain, to keep anyone else from using them.

I've done that myself in the past, to protect my domain.

[FuquayDentist]

HostGator gives unlimited storage space on cheap shared hosting - the images will just be stored most of the time. If you are generating a lot of traffic, then the shared hosting is out and you want to upgrade to a dedicated server - then you'll be into the bandwidth and storage space limitations - but on your own server it would be better. In any event, you have the option of finding a upload plugin for wordpress (or whatever platform you use) that will upload your images and serve them from Amazon's S3 cloud hosting. Lots of people use S3 to serve their larger content items like videos. S3 has unlimited fast bandwidth, and you can use it with cheap basic hosting. One more thing you can do for speed - use cloudflare.com as your nameserver. They have a free package that's pretty good and it definitely speeds up your serving of web pages.

[Taptgylor]

Cloudflare nameservers is new to me. Is that something you can only use with Amazon S3?