Hosting

I checked out Amazon's EC2, and it looks kinda cool. I don't anticipate MegaHAL10 to be massively popular, so I'd expect to be able to run it on a single server, but I like the idea of anticipating the scaling problem, so EC2 is a good candidate. Cost should be around $120 per month, given the current exchange rate. This is to have a "Small Instance" up for the entire month, and allows for a lot of data transfer; at least 10MB per day in and 100MB per day out. That might not sound like alot, but it fits my projected numbers, and multiplying the data by a factor of ten will only add about $10 per month to the bill anyway. This means, given my budget, I can fund six months before I'll need money coming in to help pay for things, which is less than my $1000 / one year mentioned yesterday.

I also need SVN hosting (I'd prefer Perforce, but can't find any hosting options for that, and I don't want to run my own server). beanstalk offer free SVN hosting, so I think I'll go with that.

Google's App Engine looks interesting, but is currently restricted to Python. Although that would suit a lot of projects I've got on the backburner, my intention with MH10 is to develop a stand-alone client, and C++ is a better option for me in that case.

Finally, I need a funky logo, so I plan to ask an artistic friend of mine to knock up a suitably Web2.0 logo, and the remainder of my budget will go on that. So the plan is to get a professional looking "coming soon" page up-and-running on EC2 under the megahal10.com domain as soon as possible. Once that's there, I'll be able to work both top-down (i.e. flesh out the web front-end) or bottom-up (the back-end), and it'll be nice to have the flexibility to switch between these two tasks as my mood dictates.