[kedaniel]

We are planning an address lookup / directory
portal with a login/user profile feature.
There will first be hundreds of users,
most likely pretty quickly thousands, firstly
querying several million
addresses (firstly around 5 or 6 mill).
Some info is available for
anonymous users, the rest behind a login.
The users will not edit other info than
their own profile, so the queries to the
big table(s) are read-only.

In an Access MDB file the db is around 3gb.

1. I need some advice on when one should
consider a dedicated server in terms of
amount/speed/etc. Could we start out with
a co-hosting package and see how it works,
or is this amount already something that
needs its own server? Pricewise, I wonder
if the very size of the db file(s) actually
could prove less economic on a shared server
than having our own..?

2. How big will such a db be in MySQL? (disk space needed)

3. Then there is the rather obvious security
concerns, especially making sure the data "cannot"
be compromised.
I am of course aware of that one should have
a dedicated server where one fully controls
security related issues, but I want to see
if anyone have examples on whether this could
be sufficiently secured in a shared environment
as well.

It is mostly a read-only db, the updates could
be done on another machine , then publishing
only updates to the online version.
Does this affect security in any significant
way?

4. Any suggestions on service providers that
offer Linux/MySQL hosting and mirroring
in both Asia (preferably China) and
Europe/US?

Any advice is most welcome :-)

Regards,
kedaniel

[jbroder]

I doubt you can get shared hosting that will allow you 3gb of mysql space, most is in MB. I also doubt you can get shared hosting that will have mirroring at all anywhere. So, it seems you will need to get dedicated server(s).

I hope this is useful.