This question is best answered by someone with direct experience of
running a sizeable community website.

It is part of an undergraduate coursework, but doesn't constitute a
significant part of the question (which is more social/qualitatively
based), it would just be good to have some notion of actual numbers
rather than inserting completely random ones. _With vague references,
neccessary_. We're talking "not up to the standard of thorough
scrutiny", but "more accurate than random numbers".

Background: The envisioned website will be community-based, with
personal profiles, a low subscription fee, community boards, and to a
corporate standard, set up by an existing theoretical corporation.
We're talking a cross between deviantart.com, (minus the image/art
focus) ebay.com (minus the legion of users) and faceparty.com, with a
moderately narrow interest target of consumer electronics. I'm free to
postulate initial demographics/target segment, # of visitors and
subscriber %, so SCALE is also an issue.

Questions are;

- What might be the cost of intially developing, and maintaining, the
website codebase itself? What do various developers charge today?
Using a premade template would not work.

- What hardware costs are likely to be incurred initially, e.g.
servers, at different user levels?

- What bandwith costs will there be? I.e. likely bandwith usage per
visitor, and the cost of bandwith?

- What is the cost of community handling/moderation? How many
full-time employees would you need at different user levels? This
might be tricky.


Again, references are more important than specificity. "My
website has 3.8 full-time employees and costs £959.85 per month" is a
lot less useful than a somewhat justifiable "Company ___ had a user
base of xx run with yy
employees, as shown at nn.com"

If estimating at different user levels is overly difficult, I can
probably whip together a visitor base number first. Tipping $0-20.