I am starting up a network gaming portal and was wondering how I should host it. I plan on eventually turning this into a business so I figured hosting on my own servers would be the best option. What specs am I looking for in a server for a network that will be focused on media and community? Will a T1 connection be the best choice? How is bandwidth controlled? And how many servers should I start out with? Thanks in advance for any advice!
I am not exactly sure what you mean by "network gaming portal", but if you are expecting a lot of requests (hits) to your site, I suggest you look into Amazon's S3 service. You can still have your own server (either virtual or dedicated), but you can offload your graphics/multimedia files or any other big files onto S3, and you'll be able to handle a lot more visitors to your site without bogging down your own server. Hope this helps!
Media is very bandwidth consuming,for this you need unmetered 1Gbps dedicated port to cope with the media streaming demand. You need to start with 1 server first.