I need some suggestions from the pros. I am starting a website for a certain type of engineering professional. It will hopefully grow to a worldwide membership of 5000 paid members one day. I have some background with designing, writing and optimizing a website and web pages from a marketing perspective (collaborating with IT), but am by no means experienced with web dev. I do have some basic familiarity with frontpage and am otherwise pretty savvy tech wise. Anyway, I am going to build a main website and an ancillary vbulletin board. Both will need to be fully functional. The site will need a way for subscribers to pay, and once traffic is generated, a way to for advertisers to submit payment electronically.

While I believe there is great opportunity for the site to become profitable, I really want to start slow (financially) and test my assumptions. If it takes off, then I’lI hire a web dev guy and do it right. But for now, I’ll be getting it started on my own with as little cost as possible. Keep in mind that I am not looking for cheap, I am willing to spend $ where it makes sense.

I have been searching quite a bit and am ready to pull the trigger with a host so that I can buy vbulletin and start exploring it’s capabilities. My assumption is that once I have chosen a good host partner, they will help me with website suggestion…additional software, setup, etc.

Here is the approach I am going with?

Find a web host:
with a user friendly web building app.
that has Ecommerce capabilities (for processing ad revs)
that has experience hosing vbulletin.
that is fully scaleable
is there anything else I need that I am forgetting
and finally, what would be a reasonable monthly cost for year 1.

I wouldn't depend on your host to help you with the software side of things. Most don't that. It's up to you to manage your software. They may help in terms of making sure the server has what you need for your software to run, but that's about it.

OK, let me take a step back. Is there somewhere on this forum or elsewhere that I can go and do some reading about what I need to set this thing up? I was just reading moments ago on vbulletin's forum support site about ad serving sofware, which I will need to add to the list of things to look into. I really just need a laundy list of...here are the things you will need to accomplish your goals. Can you think of anywhere that exists?

Hi cccinga,

If you contact me via aim/yahoo/msn/email I'd be more than happy to walk you through and answer any questions you may have. I've been in the web design/hosting business for well over four years.

Ron