A little bit of help please

[Fishboy1983]

Good afternoon guys and girls.

I have a few questions that i hope some of you would be kind enough to answer for me.

I am in the process of developing a business plan for a new venture that i am going into. Whilst i have vast experience in business management and marketing, i am not so hot on web development. The business is going to be based around a online auction site but in a niche market, but i need the answers to the following questions if poss.

1) Is it possible to have a auction site similar to ebay (but a lot smaller) developed without it costing 10's of 1000's?

2) Products listed would be around 50,000 a month, so a tiny fraction of ebay, but is this still too much/ too big?

3) Ball park cost of such a website?

4) Where to host?

5) How much would the hosting be?

6) Any other pointers or considerations i need to think about?

I would be so grateful for any info, no matter how small. Thank you

Chris

can anyone answer any of the questions?

 

[Bucky24]

1) Of course it's possible, but you'd probably have to do a lot of it yourself if you want to keep it cheap. And it's doubtful that you could get as many features or the same look without putting up some cash for it (or, again, doing it yourself).

3) Depends on who you go to. You can probably find a cash-strapped college CS major who can do it for a couple hundred dollars. There are also many freelancers who do website design, though they might be a bit more expensive.

4) This one ties in with #2: if you're going for 50,000 NEW products every month, then you probably want a dedicated server. 50,000 by itself is not that much for a standard database to handle, but after a few months you're going to start seeing some slowdown if you use shared hosting. Dedicated hosting is a bit more expensive (usually in the $20-$100 a month range, depending on where you go), but for something like this, shared hosting won't cut it.

6) I've never run any sort of an auction/store website, but I can tell you that your database is crucial. How you store the data, how you query it, can cause significant slowdown if done improperly.

Hope that helps!

-Bucky24

 

[sadkiss]

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