Hi everyone,

I am creating a website with audio files my friends and I made for visitors to download. Each file has an average size of 10mb and the total memory we need will surely not exceed 10GB. The website will contain text and some pictures. On each page, there will be 3-5 relatively small (300X100) Flash banners. Bandwidth is hard to predict but I guess for the first month it would be around 1000GB. I have been browsing through webhostingtalk.com for several days, and I am now extremely confused as to what hosting plan to purchase. Please help!

If we do need such high bandwidth, we would probably need a VPS or dedicated server. But the problem is that we are not sure if the website will be as popular as we predicted. Therefore, I am just thinking if we can start with the premium shared plan from goDaddy which allows a 2000GB of bandwidth for $14.99/month. I know they oversell a lot and some said their service is bad. But I also heard that their hosting is fine as long as your website does not put a heavy load on their CPU. Somebody mentioned in other posts that a downloading website like mine does not use much of the CPU. So I am thinking if I can start with their shared plan, and upgrade to a VPS or dedicated as needed. The reason why I don't want to start with a VPS or dedicated plan is that we can't predict the demand for the website yet, so I don't want to pay for services I don't need.

I know downloading speed will probably be slow at goDaddy but I can live with that for the first month. I just want to make sure the website will be up most of the time because we will do heavy promotions in the first month and we don't want to lose any visitors. I am open to any suggestions, and I don't HAVE to start with a shared plan.

Or should I store all the audio files on another server? Would that do me any good?

As you can probably tell, I am a complete noob in this and I can't manage a server. iWeb8.com's dedicated plans seem attractive but they only provide "level 1 management" which only includes the basics like ping monitoring and 24/7 emergency support. Is that enough? Or would I need to hire somebody to maintain the server for me?

I have done quite a lot of research on this but still I am really lost. Please help! Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Please suggest to me what I should do. Many thanks!