Until your site goes viral, quashes your "dedicated" server (or the providers upstream bandwidth) and your customers are met with some fail-whale variant.
Use a rented server to get off the ground and get the prototype out there, but don't try to build a backbone on that model. Especially when you're going to be doing streaming, your uptime IS your product, renting a server is like trying to start a livery service by going to Avis every morning and renting a car each day. It will work great, until it doesn't, and you're left scrambling.
> Until your site goes viral, quashes your "dedicated" server (or the providers upstream bandwidth) and your customers are met with some fail-whale variant.
Most sites don't "go viral". A reasonably powerful dedicated server can handle serving an incredible number of requests for static content. Any good host (like ServerBeach) is going to have far more bandwidth to spare than what you're running to your own rack. They can also give you additional servers in an hour or two in an emergency. Far more quickly than you can buy and install your own.
Using dedicated servers these days is not like it was in the past. Servers are far more powerful and bandwidth is far cheaper. One beefy server can do what a dozen older generation machines could do. That 40 server rack in 2001 is a couple dedicated servers in 2008. For me, at least.
Until your site goes viral, quashes your "dedicated" server (or the providers upstream bandwidth) and your customers are met with some fail-whale variant.
Use a rented server to get off the ground and get the prototype out there, but don't try to build a backbone on that model. Especially when you're going to be doing streaming, your uptime IS your product, renting a server is like trying to start a livery service by going to Avis every morning and renting a car each day. It will work great, until it doesn't, and you're left scrambling.