Greetings to All Forum Participants
(this is my first post)

I need to select a web host to launch a new kind of internet portal. Since this will be my first time using a web host, I would appreciate your advice to help find some good choices that will meet my needs.

NEED GOOD TECHNICAL SUPPORT
Although I put a lot of work into developing this portal and it provides a fun new way to surf the net, I am not a computer-related professional so I will need a web host that will provide good help with the logistics.

NEED A LOT OF BANDWIDTH (I HOPE)
I assume I would have to eventually develop a lot of traffic to be able to financially support the portal or make a profit. At this moment, I don't think I need more than 10 Mb of STORAGE or any fancy features. But, it appears that most web host plans I have looked at are very low on allowed BANDWIDTH (5 - 20 Gb/month for plans from $10 - $130 per month) compared to the amount of bandwidth I believe I would need to be successful.

WOULD SUCCESS BE FATAL?
I am concerned that, with a virtual hosting company, if I was really successful in building a large amount of traffic, my account (allowed bandwidth) couldn't handle the traffic and all the new potential customers coming to visit my portal would be denied access to the site. I am afraid I might also go broke paying all the $/per excess Mb of bandwidth charges. My understanding is that my potential new customers may have to wait two weeks or more for me to switch everything over to a new web host that could handle the traffic: is that correct?

YOUR RECOMMENDATIONS PLEASE
How would you recommend that I start up my new internet portal. I was looking at virtual hosting companies with good support but now I am worried about the (bandwidth) scenario described above. Do I need to start with a dedicated server? I don't have a money tree in the back yard so that would be a tough hurdle for me with no current revenues coming in. Which hosts would you recommend for my situation?

Thank you very much for reading this and any advice you can offer.

I think you should go with tera-byte or site5, aletia too. and if you have success ( wish you all the best) than you ll be able to get some dedicated solutions from 4webspace,catalog or rackshack. o yes, what sort of portal are you planing to run?

I suggest you just get a plain webhosting package and grow.

Depending on types of portals.... you can offer webmail to your users, operate a search engine database and yet these scripts are everywhere!

I'd have to agree with the others. Go with a shared server to start out with and give yourself room to grow. You'll want to concentrate on developing the portal, not adminning the server.

If you want to PM/IM me I'll be happy to share some of the numbers on my "portal".

Frank

Thank you for your reply Angel78,

I will look into those companies you recommended.

FOLLOWUP QUESTION
If you don't mind, I still would like your opinion on if I wouldn't run into a catastrophe with the virtual hosts if my traffic increased suddenly and dramatically. Wouldn't I lose many of my customers and possibly pay a lot in excess bandwith fees if I exceeded the virtual host package bandwith limits? Do you know any way I can plan to avoid this problem? Doesn't it take 2 or more weeks to transition from a virtual host to a different dedicated server host?

Thanks again

ANSWER TO YOUR QUESTION RE: THE PORTAL?
Regarding your question on what sort of portal I will run: I have tried to create a new, definitely more fun, more efficient way for people to surf the net. The portal will help people to get to the best web pages that meet their interest more eFficiently without wading through lots of junk web pages but also show them the best search tools, etc. if they want to look wider. I built it with the single goal to be the best portal for the user; it doesn't focus on getting them to advertisers and partners, just to get them the best net-surfing experience. My philosophy has been to build the best portal for the customer first and to figure out how to break even financially (or maybe a little better I hope) later. It is designed to also guide people to parts of the internet and to new activities on the net that are unknown to many surfers. BUT WHAT IS REALLY NEW AND DIFFERENT? Well, I can't give it all away quite yet because of copyright and trademark issues, etc., but it will be very graphics oriented and as far as I can tell, there is no other portal similar to it out there now. It is not starting out high-tech, but it took me years of customer oriented thinking and work to prepare it. Thanks for asking

Originally posted by Arizona
Thank you for your reply Angel78,

I will look into those companies you recommended.

FOLLOWUP QUESTION
If you don't mind, I still would like your opinion on if I wouldn't run into a catastrophe with the virtual hosts if my traffic increased suddenly and dramatically. Wouldn't I lose many of my customers and possibly pay a lot in excess bandwith fees if I exceeded the virtual host package bandwith limits? Do you know any way I can plan to avoid this problem? Doesn't it take 2 or more weeks to transition from a virtual host to a different dedicated server host?

Thanks again

ANSWER TO YOUR QUESTION RE: THE PORTAL?
Regarding your question on what sort of portal I will run: I have tried to create a new, definitely more fun, more efficient way for people to surf the net. The portal will help people to get to the best web pages that meet their interest more eFficiently without wading through lots of junk web pages but also show them the best search tools, etc. if they want to look wider. I built it with the single goal to be the best portal for the user; it doesn't focus on getting them to advertisers and partners, just to get them the best net-surfing experience. My philosophy has been to build the best portal for the customer first and to figure out how to break even financially (or maybe a little better I hope) later. It is designed to also guide people to parts of the internet and to new activities on the net that are unknown to many surfers. BUT WHAT IS REALLY NEW AND DIFFERENT? Well, I can't give it all away quite yet because of copyright and trademark issues, etc., but it will be very graphics oriented and as far as I can tell, there is no other portal similar to it out there now. It is not starting out high-tech, but it took me years of customer oriented thinking and work to prepare it. Thanks for asking

A Bit of advice:

Start of with a basic design of the portal.

-Partner with BMB
-Incorporate GOOGLE or install Links 2.0 (MySQL Version)
-Go to moreover and get the daily news panels with coverage on Stocks/ WorldNews/ Entertainment Daily/ etc.
-Open a user Discussion area
-Add some nifty how to tutorials

and walah you have a portal to grow with.

when you see alot of visitors then it is time to add more nifty features such as

-Personal Planner
-Personal Chat
-Affiliate with Amazon to earn some revenue
-Online Games where users can compete with each other online
-etc

You should have a mini YAHOO running by this time.

What kind of audience are you aiming for?

Originally posted by Synergy

-Partner with BMB


why would anybody link up with Baltic Marine Biologists (BMB)

-Michael

I meant BigMailBox.com lol

Lol.

I tried opening a portal once too, it's extremely hard to do. Good luck.

Thank you all so much for your helpful responses. I refer back to them further below.

If I am not imposing too much on you, I would like to ask for any additional suggestions you have focused more specifically on the topic directly below. I got a lot of nice responses that suggested features to include and while these were very helpful, I seemed to have diverted you away from my main concern:

HOW SHOULD I PLAN AHEAD TO AVOID A POTENTIAL BANDWITH CRISIS
I understand that, among other things, most of you are advising me to begin with a virtual host; that seems to make good sense. But I am still nervous about what I should do right now to avoid a disaster if my traffic later rises suddenly and dramatically beyond virtual hosting package limits. If I am lucky enough to have enough success that it results in a sudden, very high bandwidth demand, I fear having to choose between very high, prolonged $ per excess Mb bandwidth charges with no $ limit and extended customer denial of service due to bandwidth restrictions (e.g., restricted by my ability to pay for it) If it is only my ignoragnce that is causing the fear, please help me to understand why this shouldn't be a concern. Is it essential that I find a virtual host that also routinely provides dedicated servers or can you help me to understand why I don't need to limit myself to them? Would you recommend any good quality hosts that do both virtual and dedicated?

If I exceed a virtual host's fixed bandwith limit, do you think most would negotiate to allow me a rate equivalent to a dedicated server host for the same amount of bandwidth or could I end up having to pay even thousands of dollars per month if the excess used bandwidth went high enough?

Thanks again for any advice and thanks for your patience with my paranoia on this issue.

DISCUSSION RE: YOUR EARLIER REPLIES
All your input was great. I hope I haven't used the term "portal" incorrectly. I found it particularly educational and interesting that some of you mentioned features in a way I inferred to mean they were a given for all portals. My lack of sophisticated internet/computer training and experience probably explains why I had a less sophisticated/more naive approach to a portal design. The "thing" I have created will probably not have some or many of those otherwise "must have" features for portals. But I will consider all items you have mentioned and I actually was already thinking of adding some of them after launching the heart of my web site. I am currently assuming it will not need extras to accomplish its purpose but I will always be open to enhancing it if it improves it while still keeping it manageable.

Actually, I don't intend to compete with the many good internet portals that are already out there; I don't have the resources and it doesn't sound like that much fun anyway. I guess I went into the creation process with little or no preconceptions about what an internet portal should be. I hope this "something new" doesn't confuse people by being too different, but what the heck, I will give it a try. To me it is much more fun to try something innovative; I am trying to provide people with a new and more enjoyable to surf the net - not just mimic existing portals. Nonetheless, all of your comments were still helpful and will be considered carefully.

Synergy, you asked me about my targeted audience: great question! I hope my site will appeal to all people who like to surf the net but I believe it will be especially appealing to those who are highly visual oriented people, those attracted to graphics, those who tire easily of reading small print on internet portals, children and people with limited English skills who can recognize and relocate graphics easier than finding or interpreting text.

Some of you mentioned some terms I am not sure about. Thanks for clarifying BMB. Is the purpose of Big Mail Box to let you provide email accounts for customers? You emphasized databases, Google and Links 2.0. What purposes did you have in mind. Were you suggesting I use them to help users find content on my web site?

Thanks very much

If you are that concerned perhaps you go with a dedicated server from the beginning?

rackshack.com offers 300 GB traffic (and they do not kick you, if you really use that or even more!) but the server (RaQ4 with 256 MB RAM) are not the best to handle databases. Users who run vBulletin2 forums on it say, that the CPU load gets pretty high, if more than 150 users are browsing the forums. But update the RAM to 512 MB and it will be more.

If you have some experiences with solaris go with their netra. it seems little slow with the 500 Mhz, but it is a RISC prozessor and will handle really much of traffic/user.

both server are for $99/month with $250 one time fee for setup.

If you want to have a stronger server than a RaQ try venturesonline.com. they have a good repute, especially in the vBulletin.com community. Perhaps you could try their virtual hosting packages at the beginning. you get for $25 500 MB space and 20.000 GB traffic. additional traffic is not that expensive as well.

A couple of follow ups:

Your concern about bandwidth

This is not a bad fear :D. You are correct that if you suddenly became very popular your costs could get very high. OTOH, it's much more difficult to create a popular internet site than most people think.

The Rackshack route mentioned above is a good method, but you do have to have some understanding of how to administer a server. The RaQ's are quite easy, as the control panel is simple to use. Since you would just have one site, it's even easier. The Netra's OTOH, don't come with a control panel, so it would be more difficult.

Another option would be to just host with a good company that offers both shared and dedicated servers. If you use their DNS servers, when you move it's only a change in their DNS and the change would appear instantly to everyone else.

Why use a database

Well I'm not 100% sure what you site will be, but most people with large dynamic sites use databases. Using SQL it more effecient to query the data (as opposed to text files). It's easier to back and restore. You get better concurrency (usually). Concurrency is multiple people going after the data at once. The list for using a database just goes on (of course I am a Database Administrator :D).

I hope this helps a little more.

Frank

Originally posted by Arizona
If I am lucky enough to have enough success that it results in a sudden, very high bandwidth demand, I fear having to choose between very high, prolonged $ per excess Mb bandwidth charges with no $ limit and extended customer denial of service due to bandwidth restrictions (e.g., restricted by my ability to pay for it)

At least a valid point. I would look for a host with the ability to grow, a host which is able to provide not only the usual small accounts but also accounts with more bandwidth and later, possibly, a dedicated server.
And I would ask for the prices for large bandwidth packages.