I own a small gaming network. Right now all the hosted sites are just on my host under a mysite.com/theirname. My question is how do the big gaming networks, gamespy.com, ga-sports.com, trintium.com, host their sites. Since they offer unlimited everything, do they own their own hosting company? Or do they run their networks off a dedicated server? Or something else all together?

Since they usually start small, they'll just either start off at a free host, or a cheap virtual host (like http://www.below10host.com ) - then move on to maybe using a reseller program to get space at cheaper costs (and there are plenty of examples of such hosts).

Once they get pretty big it's time for them to make the jump to co-lo/dedicated servers. Usually you'll find that the majority of the 'huge gaming sites' are placed on dedicated servers, such is the amount of traffic they consume.

Just remember : there ain't anything such as unlimited.

I eventually expect to expand so I will need more server space. I'll continue giving customers a mysite.com/theirsite domains. I don't really need anything except space and the ability to run CGI scripts. So would something link powerraq.com be somehting to look into, or I'm completely off track here?

You'll want to search for that name here, but to sum up, hidden DNS fees are what users complain about. I'm not sure how they are hidden, but... maybe if you don't run DNS through your RaQ?

I'm new to this and don't know what I'll be doing. Since I have only one domain pointing there, I suspose these 'hidden fees' still apply?

I don't think it would then. If you wanted to host domains this would be an issue, but for *one* domain, probably not. If I remember correctly, their plan allows you something like 5-10Gb/mo and overage fee was somewhere around $5-$10/Gb/mo. If the site is going to be busy, then you'll want to be sure *this* cost is as low as possible.

In other words, if the site uses just 10Gb over your plan, and this provider is $5 more/Gb than somewhere else, then having your server there will end up costing you $50 more. Get me?