Hi, I have decided to start selling templates via a blog and upload the demosites and my blog on a paid hosting, however I am not entirely sure what to buy. Expensive/Cheep, Unlimited/15~20GB?... I could really use some directions in this area. Also, I am planning on creating a medium project with a friend, a site that will have user uploaded photos, videos - web quality, nothing more than the size of youtube videos- and a forum. We are expecting around 200~500 users for the first year, and we are not sure about the needs of such a site neither. Any help would be great.
How big are the templates? I recommend compressing them in .rar with WinRAR to shrink the file. To maximize the chances of selling your templates, you need a provider with high reliability and fast speeds. They (probably) won't wait around for it to load, and will move to the next provider if its down... Will it be expensive? Probably not. Is it cheap? Definitely not. Avoid providers that offer unlimited hosting for $30 a year. They barely last a few months. For the template site, i would buy a smaller package, but make sure its reliable. The video site would be quite busy (i am assuming). I'd buy a VPS, since the scripts tend to be resource intensive. If you aren't knowledgeable in the area, purchase a fully managed plan. If it only has 200-500 users, maybe just buy a higher shared plan.
200~500 registered users in 6 months, expecting 1000~2000 pageviews/day - not my estimation, a friend of mine is fairly confident about this-. Thank you Jafhost, I will be considering buying from a reliable source.Rep added.
Jafhost had some great recommendations. Just remember, nothing in hosting is totally unlimited. You might can find unlimited disk, and bandwidth, but the company will limit you somehow, either in CPU usage, or memory usage. Statistically, hosts that are not unlimited, generally charge a little bit more, and they offer you so much more flexibility with CPU usage. At any rate, good luck in your search!