I used to run an image hosting site that ranked about 15,000 on Alexa. I also had a file hosting site ranking right around there. Not quite Imgur or Megaupload, but I wouldn't want to be anyways.
It cost several thousand dollars per month for bandwidth and was extremely hard to monetize. Removing illegal content was a pain and taking care of the DMCA notices was a pain (probably even worse now with tools like www.tineye.com).
I was in your position, except a little further down the road, and I decided it didn't make sense to keep it running. Maybe if I hung in there it could have been successful, but bandwidth usage was increasing exponentially.
A lot of "unlimited" bandwidth hosts don't like image/file hosts because they are known to use their full allotment. Be prepared to pay $2,000+ per 20TB. Amazon S3 does 14 cents per GB, but if you give SoftLayer a call they can probably hook you up with 10 cents per GB.
You must mean Google.com.au. The way Google is heading these days, a lot of searches are localized by country/state/city/etc. so it's really important to make sure you're tracking your rankings on the right Google domain. That being said, yes it works for .com.au.
Depends what country your in really. Always check your local laws and regulations before taking advice on the internet; the laws for someone may not be the same as yours.
I think he was trying to say that you should want to help your customers. You should be happy to receive a work order from them because now they are a satisfied tenant that can praise your apartments to their friends who have been trying to get their sink fixed for a month.
My friend is a renter and he has wanted a renters interface like this for years.
Why would this be a bad practice? This is a GOOD practice. You don't want to add months to the development time before you know if it's going to get traction.
I've had several successful sites, but dozens more failures and I'm glad I didn't waste the time making them all easily scalable; they simply didn't need it.
It sounds like you haven't even talked to investors yet. You don't need a corporation to create a TOS, nor do you need a corporation to accept payments.
Cross those bridges when you get there. I don't see this leverage you keep referring to. They restructure businesses all the time. Having the right incorporation doesn't make your startup/idea/business any better, so why don't you focus on improving those things?
A high tech tanning spa. One of the tanning beds cost 30k and looked like a spaceship. I went all out with this thing, using some money from an exit. I re-did the floors, walls, electric, plumping, etc. in the end I was out about 500k after running it for a year. A lot of that money went towards rent and payroll. I had 4 or 5 employees, including a manager, during peak season.
It was difficult to iterate the business, I was locked into a lease, and the equipment was too big to move easily, so I couldn't just pack up and move to a new location when I realized I didn't pick the greatest location.
The worst part was dealing with the local governing agencies for insurance, workman's comp, town, state, federal, permits, etc. They shut me down for a day or two over something trivial and I spent 8 hours driving around to fix it. Felt like the equiv. of my domain being seized and it wasn't worth it for such a thin profit margin.
There was no doubt that I could make it work, but I didn't want to spend the time or money trying to get it right. I have the internet startup stuff down pat; I'll just stick to what I know best.
Most of them can't handle really large attacks. Wikileaks was supposedly getting hit with more than 10Gbps, which is right around the maximum Peakflow can handle.
When an attack this big targets a small business, they usually just null route the servers, essentially sending all data into a blackhole. The downside is that their website will be inaccessible by legitimate users. The upside is that they don't have to pay for the used bandwidth, which is pricey at 10Gbps.
I bet you didn't get reported either.
I'm removing FB Connect from all my sites. They handled this terribly.