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I have a website I'd like to develop that might eventually get fairly large (in terms of what's stored and how many people visit). My question is, will staying with a hosting company (namely, FatCow) be a complete disaster? Or is there an alternative?

I know very little about this aspect of web dev, so it would be great if any technology I need to learn was mentioned with some detail.

Thank you very much.

EDIT: Thanks for the responses. Until now I've had sites that have been purely informational (real estate agents, restaurants, etc.). I'm looking to try something more serious (for me, anyways), with user accounts and a small to medium sized community regularly posting and uploading things. My concern is that I don't know if I can just host it with FatCow and have all be well. I've never made a site with enough activity to be a problem, so I don't know what the limit is, or what needs to be done in this situation.

I suppose a good example would be this: could a website like serverfault be hosted on FatCow (don't expect as much traffic, but the idea is the same). If not, then what should be done instead?

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You may want to clarify exactly what your concerns are (FatCow as provider, hosting scalability, etc?) but in general all companies want their clients to succeed, grow and buy more stuff. – Ed Fries Jan 7 '11 at 23:34
I was tempted to downvote this question because I'm not sure if there's really a specific question to answer here. – Phil Hollenback Jan 8 '11 at 1:14

closed as off topic by l0c0b0x, GregD, pehrs, Jason Berg, Zoredache Jan 8 '11 at 2:59

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1 Answer

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Stored data and hits relates then to disk space and bandwidth. Any shared hosting provider will cope fine to a point but there will be limits.

The fatcow website shows unlimited disk space and bandwidth but in practice you'll find that they won't be too pleased if you fill up their disks and sap up their bandwidth.

Also most shared hosts have a memory limit on their accounts, if php is running as cgi then as little as a dozen visitors interacting with a php intensive site can cause performance problems and ultimately might bring the site down.

For developing your site and benchmarking it you're probably fine for the moment but you'll want to gather disk usage stats, memory usage stats and bandwidth stats then scale it up based on your estimated traffic. Once you have the figures you can build a server infrastructure around that as appropriate.

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