I'm very inexperienced when it comes to web hosting, but I'm trying to learn. Im in the process of having a site built and it will be free for people to use so my hope is that it grows at a fairly rapid pace. I know it may never grow to the size of site like Plentyoffish.com but I'm curious to know if anyone has an idea as to what a site like that's monthly hosting bill looks like. I want to get an idea of what the absolute worst case scenario would be. According to what I've seen Plentyoffish gets around 30 million hits per day. 1.1 billion page views per month. 45 million visitors per month. Thanks!
I am estimating that it may cost $xxx,xxx to $x,xxx,xxx per month. They are hosted with clusters of servers and serving the static requests with Akamai CDN. With a hugh site like this, they have dedicated servers for each type of services (SQL, Database, Mail, etc..). Akamai CDN helps to offload the system resources by caching static files (images, etc.) to their xx,xxx servers worldwide. This help to bring requests faster to each geographical location. With clusters of servers, you have to take inconsideration of other cost factor such as firewall, security, system administrator, network administrator, load-balancing, etc.. Furthermore, with the usage of Akamai CDN, this will contribute a major cost of part of the hosting fee.
There is no limit how much can the servers cost. However, the more traffic you have the more you pay for the hosting and the more you earn. So be happy if you pay more for the hosting because it means that you also earn more
I do not know for sure,. But I think that you need to have such web site first of all and only then start worring about web hosting solution for it.