How much should I budget for servers for my new crowd funding website?

Welcome to Fluther.

It’s a pretty simple calculation, really.

How much do servers cost? How many customers can a server handle? How many customers do you expect to have?

Your server budget should be “cost per server” times “customers to be served” divided by “server customer capacity”, with a “budget floor” of “cost per one server”, I suppose.

I think serving videos will be the expensive part. I’ve heard good things about Amazon’s S3 service for serving media. Here’s a link to their S3 pricing page.

@gorillapaws has a good idea, try a cloud service. You don’t want to have a huge amount of capital sunk into servers in the case the site doesn’t take off, and you don’t want to have to scramble to build out IT if it does take off big time. If you get big enough you can hire folks to figure out your datacenter.

p.s. write a business plan, your question above is only one of several important questions you want to answer to understand whether your concept is a viable business.