Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Managed Hosting and Services : Huge storage & Mega upload

[gcorpz]

Hey whats going guys,

I want to start a uploading site similar to megaupload.com, sharebigfile.com..
I would like to know from any users that have experience with this and let me the budget for the project and details if possible.

Thanks!

[eth00]

That is a really vague question, you need to provide more information. The budget is completely dependent on how busy the site is and how much traffic you are going to be pushing. We currently have a client with ten's of terabtyes of data doing a similiar thing but his monthly expenses depend a lot on how much storage he needs.

If you are starting off small a cheap P4 or Xeon with a 500Gb drive will give you a fair amount of space to use. As you grow you will want to move to dedicated fileservers, whcih depending on your budget can hold multiple TB in a single server.

The budget also depends a lot on the datacenter that is choosen or if colocation is done, which depends a lot on how much up front cash you have. Once it gets rolling you can easily have tens/hundrdeds of Gb's uploaded in a day.

[trev_b4]

How successful do these kinds of websites tend to be? Just considering it for myself.

[eth00]

*IF* you are able to advertise it well and *IF* you are able to get a lot of traffic and *IF* you are able to get advertisements that pay well they can be very profitable. There are a lot of factors that go into it but if everything is done right there is a large profit potential.

[mhalligan]

Instead of developing your own site like this, have you considered to going to someone like dropsend.com or yousendit.com, and see if they'll license our their platform in a re-branded manner? There are so many sites like this now, it seems a waste to go out and code another one.

[carphost]

Originally Posted by mhalligan

Instead of developing your own site like this, have you considered to going to someone like dropsend.com or yousendit.com, and see if they'll license our their platform in a re-branded manner? There are so many sites like this now, it seems a waste to go out and code another one.

I'm wondering if there are some opensource versions to get started with. I would imagine that the profit margins are a bit low as-is and re-licensing may not be the best option.

-Scott