How much would a website similar to twitter cost to construct and maintain?

[Brad H]

I know, I think I've got the next great idea. But if anyone with sound knowledge can give me an idea price wise (and please nominate currency) of the costs involved.

I don't have any coding know-how and am trying to avoid learning it myself (my previous experiences of running a website was that it was too tiring maintaining it to have any creativity left to make it any good!)

Thanks for any help.

[Noam Azia]

a cost of website, built by a professional coder should cost about 1500$ one time payment which include repairing broken code when appears.
for starting a new web, you don't need any special server and a good one should cost about 280$ a year including the domain.
when you become popular, you will need stronger server which is out of my area of expertise.

i know all that from my friend which is some what of a professional coder and i am a noob-coder.
the server i use for jobs is hosting24.com

[Locoluis]

The basic ideas to twitter are rather simple to implement, in theory.

Essentially, you need:
- A table of users
- A table of relationships between users
- A table of messages
- Some other data.
- LOTS OF INDEXES to improve your searches, including:
-- Hash tags
-- @user mentions
-- URLs (and tinyURLs)
-- Images
-- etc.

You need to be able to serve that data to desktop computer and mobile users.

However, what's really cool of Twitter is the way they handle the COLOSSAL traffic they get. You need LOTS of bandwidth and computer resources to achieve their results. You have millions of clients checking out every single second for new tweets. You need to provide that information in pretty much real time.

Wall Street Journal says that Twitter nowadays (February 2011) costs around $10 BILLION dollars. There are no available figures on the Total Development Cost of Twitter, though; I bet it must be a significant fraction of that.

You don't want to learn how to program, design databases, design high-demand web services, design a security model, etc., so the only way you can realize that great idea you seem to have is through lots of money from your pockets.

I just hope you're not yet another dotcom boomer.

[2cwl4u]

I am a professional website builder/designer.

Twitter may seem quite basic & simple but actually it is very complex & technical. If you are wanting to create a website the likes of Twitter, you are looking at around $40,000 (maybe more).

Hope you find a good price & service for your website. =)