Does anyone know the best place to host a scalable web 2.0 site?

Hi. I have had an idea for a new start-up and am going to get it developed soon. It will be a kindof cross between facebook and ebay in a niche. Anyway I need the site to be very scalable with its hosting. Im by no means technical so I have no experience with diffent methods of hosting etc.

I have heard of cloud hosting being very scalable eg. Amazon EC2 and Google apps engine. Does anyone know anything about them and if they would be suitable? What other scalable forms of hosting are available?

Thanks in advance for any advice

 

Amazon EC2 (especially now that instances can be saved) would be suitable for this kind of purpose. Its not exactly cheap but it will allow you to scale up almost instantly.

Another option (cheaper) is to get a VPS with a host that offers in-place (OS/data is kept) upgrades so you can get more RAM and bandwidth as you grow.

 

Perhaps something like LT's AppLogic platform, which is hugely scalable quickly (that's what they say, anyway). It effectively a VPS, though. You might want to check it out.

Jay

 

MediaTemple Grid is also a feasible option.

 

You could try Mosso

 

Mosso is run by Rackspace but the last time I checked, it was rather unstable. If you have the budget, you may wish to simply go directly with Rackspace and they would work with you to scale up as your site grows.

 

Have you heard gogrid.com ?, it can be another option to get scalable cloud computing.

 

amazon / mosso are extremely expensive. I'd recommend getting some good servers with calpop, or any other REALLY GOOD datacenter, then kick your admins' butt back to work when you need to add more.