What is the average start up cost for a high profile website?

[iDUB]

Im curious about how much it costs to start websites such as Facebook or Twitter. I have been thinking about starting a website for a while now, but i feel as though the initial prices that website design firms give you are for a very low tech and sparsely populated website.

[Barkley Hound]

It would be hundreds of thousands of dollars. They usually have investors helping them. The major cost would be the programming involved since you just can't steal existing code. Then there is all the advertising.

If you wanted your own low budget site it can be done for under $4 a month. That is what I did.

₪ ʎəɿʞɹɐq ₪

[orestes_returns]

Generally, if you're starting a website like that, you want to learn how to do the programming yourself. The laws are awful regarding website property ownership, and you can easily be screwed over. Even giving your idea to a website designer is enough for them to take it and run... the hardest part about website ownership is programming and maintenance.

With that in mind, the most expensive part of website ownership will be the servers it's running on. If you really want it "high profile" you'll probably want to be running it on your own servers... because most hosting companies will kick you off after a certain amount of bandwidth usage. Facebook started with almost nothing, but went "big" because of around 10 to 15 "angel investments" of $10,000. If you've honestly got a really great idea, and written-out business plan, and the ability to program a website (or a very very very close friend that can be a business partner/programmer) then someone, somewhere will give you the startup funds as an investment if you present yourself correctly. There are entire firms that do just that as a business.