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I want to establish a site like Ask.fm. Huge database and a feed customized for every user. I want to reach a million unique users per day and I was told that hosting providers couldn’t provide servers that could handle that.

I was also told that I would want to need my own data center and servers for that. I can’t imagine how much would it cost. So could you give me your guesses? I mean how much would something like that cost for let's say 100,000 users per day? Thanks a lot.

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    Well, you'll need to have a very successful lemonade stand…
    – bjb568
    Commented Sep 19, 2015 at 23:32
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    At a minimum, you'd need to colocate and run your own servers in a datacenter. This is what Stack Exchange does. It would probably cost several thousand to several hundred thousand dollars a month, depending on how large the site needs to be.
    – bwDraco
    Commented Sep 19, 2015 at 23:36
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    ...and you'd likely have to spend hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars upfront for the servers themselves before you can even consider choosing a datacenter to colocate in.
    – bwDraco
    Commented Sep 19, 2015 at 23:41
  • Yeah, right now I have just an idea in my head. Site, that could be a little revolution in the internet. But I have no idea how much could it cost. I am just gathering informations about that. I mean... I am just a student, I have no experience with hosting web pages and stuff like that. And "million users per day" is what I expect later on, but 100,000 users per day is something that I expect pretty soon after the page is released.
    – Martin
    Commented Sep 20, 2015 at 0:05
  • Have you considered Rackspace or AWS services?
    – bwDraco
    Commented Sep 20, 2015 at 16:00

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For those who actually run stuff like this, this question is very naive. We could flippantly say, "A bajillion dollars," but that's not going to help you.

You need to answer the following questions and once you have those answers, finding the answer to this question is easy enough:

  1. How large a database? Petabytes? How much data are you storing daily? How do you want to store that? Postgres db? Hadoop? NoSQL flavor? And that's a factor of the app you are creating. Django? Javascript? Ruby? Scala?

  2. Do you have a mock up of the app? Or at least a clear idea of what kind of data you want to capture and feed into those ginormous data stores? That's going to tell you how long it's going to take to code it. Hope you have friends that work for free to help.

  3. You can find service providers to do anything for the right amount of money. You need to ask yourself, is the data served going to be available 24/7 or just certain hours of the day? Do you need the compute power to be heavier certain parts of the day? For lots of data (petabytes) it's likely more cost effective to have a pair of data centers that are storing that data. You likely don't need to have every bit spinning on the quick online access.

Know your app and what it is going to store. Calculate the 100,000 users per day times what the app uses for data.

We can't give you cost estimates because you essentially asked something without any data in it to judge it by. I'd suggest getting an AWS or other cloud account and trying to build the mock up of the app on a small scale. That's going to be an excellent learning experience.

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  • It is not a joke. But not everyone understands these stuff. I am just trying to get informations. Once I have them, I will be able to ask in the way you would like it. Btw Thank you for the answer, A.J. Reese.
    – Martin
    Commented Sep 20, 2015 at 0:10

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