Your best bet is to use a web host. Companies such as Server Beach(advertising on slashdot) or Rack Shack offer you ridiculous amounts of bandwidth for $99 a month. If you need a less "dirtier" approach to hosting you can go with companies such as RackSpace. These companies allow you to change your bandwidth requirements monthly. So if you know your going to be releasing a new version of your software next week you can get them to up the bandwidth for that month. If you go over your allocation most hosts will charge you at a set rate which is decided before you join the host. The later sort of hosts can offer you load balancing so that you can manage your CPU time etc. You can find hosts like these on some of the many web host directory sites such as http://www.webhostdir.com or http://www.tophosts.com. To find out what others have to say about them, you can look through some of the many forums such as http://forums.webhostdir.com or http://www.webhostingtalk.com. The forums often give you an idea of any problems customers faced with hosts and would be able to provide you with more options than you would get here. Getting an expert to manage your hosting is often better. They have multiple data lines in to their data centers, power generators if the power goes down, and so much more to help keep your site serving your customers. At the end of the day the benefits offered by professional hosts gives you much more value for money than buying and managing your own boxes but if you must do it yourself, I think the general rule of thumb is to keep your line uner 75% of capacity at all times. There must be a network nerd who can confirm that for me.
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Your best bet is to use a web host. Companies such as Server Beach(advertising on slashdot) or Rack Shack offer you ridiculous amounts of bandwidth for $99 a month. If you need a less "dirtier" approach to hosting you can go with companies such as RackSpace. These companies allow you to change your bandwidth requirements monthly. So if you know your going to be releasing a new version of your software next week you can get them to up the bandwidth for that month. If you go over your allocation most hosts will charge you at a set rate which is decided before you join the host. The later sort of hosts can offer you load balancing so that you can manage your CPU time etc. You can find hosts like these on some of the many web host directory sites such as http://www.webhostdir.com or http://www.tophosts.com. To find out what others have to say about them, you can look through some of the many forums such as http://forums.webhostdir.com or http://www.webhostingtalk.com. The forums often give you an idea of any problems customers faced with hosts and would be able to provide you with more options than you would get here. Getting an expert to manage your hosting is often better. They have multiple data lines in to their data centers, power generators if the power goes down, and so much more to help keep your site serving your customers. At the end of the day the benefits offered by professional hosts gives you much more value for money than buying and managing your own boxes but if you must do it yourself, I think the general rule of thumb is to keep your line uner 75% of capacity at all times. There must be a network nerd who can confirm that for me.