dd - do everyone a favor, stop brownnosing yourself!
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Danny, a couple of quick examples:
Dual PII processor, 512Mb Ram, 32Gb SCSI Drive, 150Gb Bandwith/Mth = 1800US$/Mth roughly 1250£/Mth
Should do the work easely.
Or the overkill:
Dual 1Gb PIII/256cache processors, 1Gb SDRAM DIMM, 2x36Gb SCSI Hardrives, RAID Controller PERC 3/QC 128Mb Price 6.700£, and then you need a quick connection! Don't know the excact price for the connection! It really boiles down to backbone cababillity and bandwith as you say.
The market is flooded with different server solutions and it should be quite easy to get a very good price if you challenge a couple of providers at the same time!
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With regards to the banners, it's a fact, at least where I live, that you get approx. 1£ per 600 banner exposures. Now let's say that you have 1 exposure for every hit, that is 10.000.000 exposures
pr. month. That is something like 16.600£
pr. month
You don't have to think about employing anyone. The marketing companies I know are getting a small percentage of the income, for taking care of all the hard work selling the banners. With regards to programmers, why make everything so fancy. I recon that most of the guys, like the way everything is running at the moment! Correct me if I'm wrong!
And now onto something more interesting! For example flying!
MP