How much would it cost to create facebook?

[funny name]

Lets say Mark Zuckerburg didnt know anything about programming or designing how much would he have to pay a company to design and program it for him roughly? I know prices vary. Also after he paid for that company to finish programming and designing it would that company own a portion of the site? Will they continue to host if the site gets a lot of users? I know these are hypothetical but I have an idea for a website and I just want to know if its possible to get it down without knowing how to do it myself. Thanks for your help.

[George262]

In it's current form it would cost hundreds of thousands. The amount spent on the servers and hosting would be substantially higher than this, going into millions.

[Jim Maryland]

You need to realize that the development of a site like Facebook is never really done. Software projects go through a development life cycle and a highly used site like Facebook will be under development to various extents until it shuts down. The cost of developing it has a lot of factors to consider as well. If you have deadlines, you'll need a lot more people (which adds complexity managing those people and what they produce) to meet the deadlines. If you don't have a deadline, a single person could work on it for <X> time as a hobby to complete it.

As for the company that did the programming in your hypothetical question, it all depends on the contract between the purchaser. If I were to pay someone to develop for me, I'd probably ensure that I'd retain full rights to the software developed and that the development company would need to turn over any documents (hard or soft copy) and source code to me. I'd opt to not allow them rights to the code for future use. This may increase the cost to me, so I'd need to evaluate that when deciding to hire.

Hosting can be done by the development company (if they offer that service) or you could purchase your own hosting service for the development company to work with.

[Lazy Boy]

ask much as they ask for because of busineess reasons

[just "JR"]

You can make a FB clone for a few $1000, and you can find free scripts to do very similar stuff.
That does NOT mean you will become the next FB (as all these dreamers think they will)!
To LAUNCH FB, Zukenberg invested 34.7 MILLIONS us$.
The cost of developing a site can be from $1000 to a few $1000's.
MAKING IT WORK (that is, getting the right visitors), is what so few people realise: it costs a HUGE amount of money to launch and advertise.
The smallest (successful) site I have made in the last 20 years cost $3000 to make.
It cost $2000/month, for 6 months, before it got some "results", and it took a total of $28,000 BEFORE it became profitable... (through TV advertising, at $1000's for 30 seconds ad show).
Another successful I participated in the making cost well over $20,000 to make, they STILL (after years) spending $1,000,000/year in advertising... but make $4mil profit per year...

When people will start realising that, maybe a few dreams will stop flying around...

[Vicki]

You might try out your idea with ning.com
It's a site where you can create your own social network
from a template.
you can have a social network up and running in a few hours.

It's not perfect, but it still might give you an idea of how many
people will go to your social network and if it will catch up.

(Prices for ning start at $3 a month and go up to $60 a month)