snowman7000

It sounds like you are pretty early in the development phase, I would recommend developing the project a little further before locking yourself into a specific host provider. Developing on your own machine or if you have a old box installing the software to run it on that and when you have more ideas of your requirements look into a provider. This will also insure you have at least an entire complete copy of your site, you might even consider version control or periodic snapshots of the project. A lot of site pricing varies widely on what features you will need, and if development gets behind (easy thing to do since most programmers are optimistic on time things will take, or other things come up in personal projects) you could wind up paying for services you dont need yet, or worse find that the plan you have is not feasible for your site

PS: make sure to find all the polices for the site on what the max usage of cpu, bandwidth, hard-drive space, databases, db-connections/queries per hour, and programming languages/scripting allowed for whatever plan you choose, some will turn off your site if it gets too active but that depends on the scope and user base.


I just noticed I didnt really answer your question about how many databases so:

It can be a thin line between including a set of tables in an existing db or dedicating a new one too it. Advantages will also depend on hardware, version, setup, parallelism in access, and other factors. I usually allocate at least one database to a site and keep most of it in that for projects an just logically separate the data by the tables, the other set up I use is one database for the sites CMS system (that I try not to manipulate directly) and one for my custom code (program accesses through BLL -> DAL -> stored procedure returning dataset or single value ).