Help, Newb, throwing $ away, hosting ?'s

Hi All, 

Please help, I need some advice, i believe i've just wasted some good money, and for nothing. 

I'm not a webmaster or experienced with hosting or dolphin, just  a regular with enough knowledge to probably get my self in hot water. 

My dilemma is as follows: 

I have cool domain, and I wanted to set up dolphin on it as a dating site.  

Started an unlimited hosting account with TMD, they loaded dolphin for me everything is fine, and has been up and running with probably no traffic for almost two months.  Also after setup I had a theme company on here install a nice theme onto the site, everything looks great. 

So i'm not getting any body to join, and found out about buying dating profiles, so got in contact with some people that sell profiles, and install them, 155,000 of them to be exact. 

I gave these guys my hosting account info so they could install them, as they were installing the site crashed. 

TMD suspended account, and are telling me something about exceeding cpu usage? 

The account is supposed to be unlimited space, and bandwith?   

How can this exceed anything if I can't even get my site up?  

There can't be any traffic people since no one is signed up, and i'm just trying to get the profiles up there as it is. 

__________________________________________________________________________________

I don't have tons of money, and was hoping to get this site up and running at least initially at a cheap monthly outlay. 

I am hosting another couple of sites not dolphin with godaddy 4GH, and have not had one glitch yet, knock on wood. Sure they get very little traffic, but still they are running. 

Can what I am trying to get done as you have read so far, install dolphin, theme, and 155k profiles be done easily on godaddy's service? 

Or should i just give up on this idea and getting it hosted cheaply now? 

Thanks for reading, and any info, 

Joe 

P.S. as of right now I got back a partial refund of $14 for the whole year from tmd, they deducted for setup fee, and  3 months hosting. I guess it's better than nothing. 

Sure space and bandwidth may be unlinited  but if you read the fine print on almost all hosting companies they will say you are allowed like 1% of there cpu power or what ever they see fit as fear cpu usage.

Your best bet here is going with a vps server with at least 1 to 1.5 gigs of ram.  cpu really isnt a factor so much as ram and disk space.   This way you can never be shut off for anything you do.  If you take down your own vps then so be it.  no one will care...

If you want to do it right, and want it to work, you wont do it cheap.

Dolphin may look like a pretty mammal that swims in the ocean, but its truly a pig. To support any sort of active community you'll need at least a VPS, but more preferrable a dedicated server with at least 2 cpu and 2-4gb of ram to keep your users happy. Whatever plan you lock yourself into, make sure it is scalable and can support your expected growth. IE - one of my VPS's is running at 300mhz/512mb, but is ready to scale on the fly as site performance dictates it.

I can tell you that I started my first community on godaddy/shared, and it ran great until more than a couple people jumped online at a time and the database filled up beyond 5mb. It was a PITA to configure and get working, also made for a headache when I had to migrate it.

Do yourself a favor and drop the fake 155k profiles. It's not ethical business practice and you can't expect your site to pick up quality members taking this route. Target your market and advertise strategically. Keep in touch with your first few members and they'll help it grow organically if you keep em happy. Lead someone into a bunch of bogus profiles that don't respond and you lose your credibility.

Not to mention, if you want to start small with as minimal cost as possible, don't bloat your database with all those fake profiles :)

Oh my goodness Joe - you paid someone to load 155,000 fake profiles on your site?  What were you thinking?

In my opinion, that is out and out fraud- especially if you charge anyone for joining.   What do you think will happen when you get your first few members, and they try to contact some of those fake people?   There is absolutely no way to grow your site organically if you start that way, but even if it were possible, it is dishonest.  

I'm sorry, I hate to be callous, but you deserved this one.   Try to pick up the pieces as best you can and start again with a more honest approach.

Ok, thanks all for the replies, and constructive criticism.  Like I said i'm really new at this.   

I never planned on charging for any membership level, but i was hoping to gain some buzz from the profiles i was going to upload.

So if I dump the profile business, and just try and build it organically,  is host for web a good host to start with on the lowest level plan, and then if site grows, they can scale up to vps or better? 

Thanks,

Joe 

You can scale up with pretty much all hosts from shared. Its just a matter of copying files and database over to the vps drive.

I am also recommending you to go for a VPS or a dedicated servers. I should say that Shared hosting will not work for a production dolphin website. It can be used at the development stage.