What is the cost for hosting a website?

This really depends. The technology you use and how it’s implemented will affect how much your infrastructure costs.

For a start, are you looking for a managed contract with a company, or unmanaged and someone in-house will take care of sysadmin?

You can get a lot of hosting for free if you are starting out. Or companies like www.dreamhost.com provide unlimited space and bandwidth, so you can pay about $100 a year for unlimited service.

Monthly page hits means nothing if you don’t give us the filesize of those page hits! Hosting is cheap, it’s bandwidth that costs money. Regardless, you can figure these numbers out for yourself by finding an average page view’s file size, multiplying that through the page views, then pricing out that much bandwidth.

@StellarAirman—unlimited is never meant literally. In general, most people who buy unlimited plans use far less than they’re paying for (and so the company makes money, because their resources aren’t actually being used as much as is paid for). This practice is called overselling.

If you do start using bucketloads of bandwidth you usually get penalized. Giving unlimited bandwidth is a little bit of a marketing gimmick; realistically, it’s not possible to promise that to hundreds or even thousands of webmasters.

If you’re just starting out your social network, try checking out Nearly Free Speech. I recommend it for people who are only doing very small tiny websites or experimenting to see how much traffic they’ll get, because you pay for what you use. There’s a pricing estimator you can use, but it’s not a very good deal for high-traffic sites (which yours might become).

More important than page hits is bandwidth, like dynamicduo said. A really graphics-intensive site that serves only 100 visitors a day could end up costing more in resources than a text-only, very barebones page of 1000 visitors a day.

@kyanblue Helpful! Lurve for you. Welcome to the collective.

Thank you! I have a thing for jellyfishes, which is why I’m here.

I’m well aware of what overselling is, but for probably 99% of the people out there, it may as well be unlimited because they would never reach a point where the host cares unless they are hosting a ton of high res videos online, etc. And buy the time a successful social networking site outgrew a shared host of some kind they’d probably have to start looking at their own servers, etc anyway.

It really depends what you want to do and how advanced this social network is. If it’s reasonably simple, then you won’t need much of an infrastructure injection to kick things off. If it’s more along the lines of Facebook and calculates things like relationships, is making recommendations, or has a high load of requests caused by front-end features (like tagging photos, or whatever), then you might need something considerably more resource-plenty.

I run a small web development studio and our most recent project, a web app called Tweet My Gaming, handles around 15,000 pageviews per day. While this isn’t particularly much, we need some pretty badass hardware because of everything the machine is doing in the background.

We have several custom servers and message queues handling tweet processing, associating tweets with games, detecting URLs in tweets and storing URL records, resolving the title of a page that points at a URL (which involves loading the original page with a HTTP request and resolving it’s title attribute), once-daily background tasks that update the game list from GamerDNA, calculate game relationships, and rank all the URLs.

The hosting is handled in a Chicago data-centre, and all told costs our client around $700 a month. This includes a dedicated person to handle sysadmin, who we can call whenever things crop up.

The hardware itself is a dedicated machine running a dual core Xeon processor, 8GB of RAM (we keep the queues in memory!), and around 1TB of storage split over a RAID array of SAS discs. Some sysadmins may even want to recommend splitting tasks out to more than one machine; having a processing server with database independent and a seperate front-end web server running a web and cache server makes sense if GamerDNA come to us and want to add any more features.

Tweet My Gaming recently appeared in an article on Mashable, and they did a pretty sweet write-up.

If you have more of an idea about what your social network allows and can reel off some basic functionality and how the thing will operate, then maybe I can help you figure out where to start.

PS: Getting some consultations with developers is a good start. How you host the thing and how much it costs entirely depends on what it’s written in and how it works.