Ites Friends,
I am allmost ready to start a new interesting and exciting online service for artists of all kinds of art. I need to start a medium sized website with maybe a small community for this. As I had to find out, my current hosting solution is not sufficient for the new site... at least I fear that.

As I had to find out, my current Webspace is less big as I thought. 500 MBs are left and I think they'll vanish soon, once you folks storm the site I have unlimited traffic. But what does this help if space runs out and I am currently not in a financial position to make big financial experiments.

So, if you know about a good hoster with good prices for hosting and where I can be sure that my site loads in less than 17 seconds (*LOL*), please let me know. Don't forget that I live in germany, so the hoster must be willing to make business with people from germany/europe. I know especially US-hosters have a bit of problems with this mostly.

Preferably I would get in touch with somebody out of this community who has enough space left to share it with me and I pay a part of the bill that reflects my ressource usage.

Just contact me, and if your solution is an alternative to my current insufficient solution we make business. Otherwise I'll have to take an awfully expensive solution at my current provider. But if I have to I must do it

Greetings

Sonny

[admin]

linux or windows?
How much space?
How much bandwidth
How much us$ can you afford per month?

linux or windows?

wow, hard question. I think it is not much of a difference to run an Apache under both Operating Systems. But for the sake of security and overall performance I would prefer a Linux-thing.

How much space?

That's the problem: Dunno by now. As I wrote you via mail, I do not plan a service to upload multimedia. I think I'll check out how far I get with the likkle space I have and see then. This is my first big online project, so I have no experience with how much space is eaten up by what. All stuff is stored in a MySQL Database.

How much bandwidth

Dunno exactly either. As there's no big multimedia data to be up- and downloaded, I think a rather small trafic will come up. Dunno how many people will sign up. I can imagine a total of up to 2000 users signing up in the first 2 months. Then it will decrease I think, because I'll mostly concentrate on promotion in the first two months and let it run then

How much us$ can you afford per month?

Hard but justified question
My first answer would be "As less as possible". Preferably I would stay on the same expense level as currently and this means about 17$ a month. But I know that this will not be possible. So I say: In long term thinking I can think about a basic cost of 50$. But this all depends how good my Premium(VIP)-accounts go. The more people sign up for a pay-account, the more I can pay... pure logic, eh?

Yeah, I know. My answers are not very sufficient. So I think I'll test the thing with my existing webspace and watch carefully when it will run out. Most probably I'll then be able to answer the questions more exactly

I'll give you a login to the platform I'm working at a soon as it is in a beta state. Then you can have a look and maybe it tells you as an experienced webmaster a lot more.

Thanks for now, I appreciate your help.

Sonny