I recently built a web-site that does both (link in sig) but if I were to market the site, which would draw a bigger crowd? Are people more interested in image hosting or file sharing?
IMO , file hosting site will draw more traffic but lots of file hosting sites come and go and only big ones like RS,MU survive . I believe you can get more traffic if you allow porno files .
If you allow just any kind of files you will get a lot more traffic from a file hosting sites. However your bandwidth needs will be bigger as well.
I'm definitly not restricting what can be uploaded except by file size. Any site that goes out of business does so because they spend more money than they're bringing in. This can happen for two major reasons: hardware and bandwidth. Hardware typically gets expensive because the software is garbage and demands more resources than necessary. You can lower the hardware demands simply by finding bottlenecks in the software and fixing them. MySpace for example could save millions in hardware costs and bandwidth if they'd just fix how things are rendered. Running out of bandwidth on a file sharing site that has built in transfer caps seems silly to me. If the users aren't covering the costs of the bandwidth then you lower the bandwidth caps to where the costs are covered or raise the cost. Or stop accepting (or just cripple further) free accounts until revenue catches up. Too many silly people would rather bankrupt themselves or go out of business than take the steps necessary to fix the problem in a more rational way than just throwing money at it. In the case of my site, I am moving around the end of next month which means a new ISP and a new IP address. There might possibly be some downtime. Shouldn't be much though. Other than that, it's just a matter of making sure the revenue keeps up with the demands or lowering the limits on accounts to cut back the resources needed. Right now the site shows a 40GB max storage capacity. I actually have over 200GB to work with plus a 160GB drive that's not being used. I figure the site should probably pretty easily bring in enough money for an additional HD when I need it. If I can fill up my drives and am bringing in good money then I'll look into other hosting options to make the site run faster. The sites that go out of business are the ones that pre-invest money they don't have for resources they don't need.