If you have a social networking site with 100,000 active members, what is the estimated hosting cost per month you have to pay webhosting company? Also is it better to use a webhosting company that is familiar hosting social networking sites? According to these http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/06/28/facebook-server-count-60000-or-more/ http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showpost.php?p=6541847&postcount=4 Facebook had around 60,000 servers around 2010 and membership was around 400 million users then so on average 1 server for every 6700 members. So for 100,000 members, 15 servers would be required. That is a lot and even at low end of $150 per server per mth that that is $2K per mth just in hosting costs alone. What is average number of users that 1 server can support? Thanks
It is best to go for a cloud hosting solution. Cloud hosting will allow you to grow your website as much as possible. The cost will depend on your site activity. It will increase and decrease as your site activity increases or decreases.
Comparing to facebook is probably going to be a bit misleading, but if you have 100,000 active users, you are going to need a decent setup.
If video hosting is available the cost would go even higher for number of servers. What is the max. number of concurent users you think will be during peak hours?
The server itself isn't the problem - throwing more hardware at more users is easy. The problem (and solution) is to have a proper setup in place - caching, divergent nodes, internal bandwidth at max capacity (if hosting on different machines or locations), not to mention a proper setup to handle a massive amount of concurrent users - there's usually limits as to how many connections a computer can have concurrently, this has to be properly set up. Bandwidth usage and handling peaks is also something you'd need to consider.