Cost per user?

Cost per user for an active, large community, What is it?

Hey people.

What I want to know is; (with all the bells and whistles, eg RMS)

1. How much does it cost to run a social network on a per user basis?

2. How many users can you have on your dolphin site before having to go to a dedicated server?

3. How many users can your community have before you have to look at server clusters?

4. Is anybody using "cloud computing" such as Amazons Ec2? What has it cost per user?

I know you people will have different hosts with different costs but any input would help.

Thanks for any input and Cheers.

Well let's take a look here, the items you will need to figure this out:

1.  Price of server(s) that you'll be running, this varies from host to host so you will need to figure this out first.

2.  Cost of bandwidth with the host you choose, again it varies so we will need that information.

3.  What do you consider a larger community?  Some will consider 5 to be large, others 500k, then we have the 1 Million.  POF has  15 Million, Facebook Claims to be at 170 Million. 

4.  How much of your site is calling items from it's own servers and how much is pulled through other sites via I-framing and so on?

5.  Now this is the best, most sites will not tell you what their costs are to run the site.  The only one that I consider somewhat large is Marcus Frind's site plentyoffish.com that runs on, I believe it's 12 servers but I could be wrong, and he claims he spends 5k one month and 40k the next month.  I guess that gives you the answer you asked for.