da288

Hi,

I'm toying with an idea which involves your standard "directory" type commerce site where you aggregate sellers (e.g. different restaurants) and let them receive their own payments off of the "food" they'd sell on the site. (I know this has been done to death, it's just for illustrative purposes). Is there any service that lets you implement this kind of payments system (i.e. let new sellers register and receive payments straight to their account) or would I have to handle the payments centrally and redistribute to end recipients myself? Any heads up much appreciated. Thanks.

Hi,

I just registered a new .it (TLD for Italy) domain name for my startup - incidentally, works great with a verb (stuff.it, eat.it etc). However, the registration process was more involved than your usual .com/.net in that I had to give a passport number (it's limited to EU citizens). More importantly, there was a clause that said the domain would have to fall under Italian law and jurisdiction (or something to that effect). I can't remember the exact wording, but I was wondering whether anyone had any experience and could explain what this meant. Apart from pedantic legalities about what content could be hosted on the domain, would it have any financial effect in terms of tax status/registration? I'd be grateful if anyone could advise.

Hi,

I have a fully working web startup that I want to launch - the cost will be primarily image hosting and while I'm reaching out to Angel Investors (London is getting better but still pretty tough), I was wondering how reasonable an equity for hosting offer would be. I presume most major startups have extra capacity left over after setting aside excess to take up variable demand slack. Do you think this is a feasible model... it would be a different way to value the company, but I can see it as a win-win for the hosting providers. Any thoughts? Thanks.

Hi,

I'm looking to deploy my startup on a scalable solution and was hoping you experienced folks at HN could give me a few wise words and tips. The start up is effectively an image editing service which will allow users to host the edited images for use wherever. I anticipate about 1 MB storage per edited image including all overheads. I intend to take a freemium approach with a free service for up to X images edited/hosted and a charge beyond that. I will possibly consider in-image advertising on the free images as a source of revenue. The problem is, I have totally no sense of scale for anticipated take up, although doing a few quick calculations for a worst case scenario (no paid subscribers) shows a significant cost per user that can potentially skyrocket in terms of Bandwidth where one simply cannot anticipate demand. How do I deal with this? Do I start off in a private beta on a simple shared/virtual server and then consider dedicated/S3/others? Also, possibly dodgy, but what about considering free image hosting solutions out there for free users on the freemium approach - I realise this is a huge liability - but just thinking about it the porn industry is probably a pretty good paradigm. I have read through the other discussions on HN on AWS/S3/Smugmug etc but they are outdated if I'm not mistaken. Any advice much appreciated, thanks!

Hi,

Newbie here. I've spun off my university project into a web prototype that I want to launch eventually, and I've submitted it in the current YC batch. I'm pretty good with it so I've got it hosted, put up a fairly basic (1 person usable) proof of concept prototype. It's also innovative (sorry guys, can't give too many specifics yet). However, I'm not experienced when it comes to rolling out on a mass public scale technically i.e. hosting scalability (cloud?), security, concurrency, redundancy, integration with facebook etc. With the odds for YC against me (as a single founder, not on the strength of my application I would hope), I need a little advice on how to proceed ahead for a Plan B case. I have experience with databases, websites and authentication and I could realistically scale the technology to a private beta phase... beyond that, having someone experienced on the deploy side would be incredibly useful. How do new startups deal with this?

ps: If you're an HNer in/around London (England) with strong Flash (AS3) skills, taken a web 2.0 from prototype to public beta, (massive bonus if you can do iPhone apps), and keen to get involved in an innovative concept, please do get in touch!