Bare Minimums

[Lunarflight]

What is needed to start out your own virtual petsite? What are the bare minimums you need to get it started?

Some obvious ones on the people side:
Ideasmith
Coder
Artist

On the hardware side:
Domain name
Hosting
Server(?)

But for the very start, when all you've got is ideas, what do you need on the hardware side? At what point does a petsite need a server? Hosting? Domain name?

I'm new to all this, so any advice would be much appreciated.

[Sar]

Well for the most part, a new site should start off at renting a basic server. Owning a server is very costly, and I believe you need to have a decent income (from ads, supporters in the game, etc.) to fund it.

Or at least that's how I see it, I never ran a pet site before.

[cpvr]

Well for the most part, a new site should start off at renting a basic server. Owning a server is very costly, and I believe you need to have a decent income (from ads, supporters in the game, etc.) to fund it.

Or at least that's how I see it, I never ran a pet site before.
Ya, a shared server at least. Then, after all the features, items and content are done - as well as establishing a great user base, then you'll otugrow the shared server and move on to a dedicated server.

[Vivacity]

You need some sort of server space to start anything at all, unless you're going to program the entire thing locally and collect art from your artists, then upload it, but I like having a live site first. A domain is needed for when you're going to go public, or sooner depending. You'll need a programmer first, to get any physical task done, you can always use placeholders for art, then you need artists, writers, etc.

[Lunarflight]

Any advice on how much server space to start out?

[Sar]

Hmm....Well just a guess without Flash, I would think maybe 10MB for the content and 5MB for user data.

I want to help you more, but all I can offer are guesses. :(

[OwlManAtt]

Dreamhost (http://www.dreamhost.com/hosting.html) is all you really want.

[Vivacity]

If your just starting, I suggest getting shared hosting from hostgator.com, the baby package is more than enough, and is pained monthly, It should be way more than substantial for development, and even support the site for a few months once its live.

hostgator.com