Unique dating site idea
 

Hi everybody,
I have a unique idea for a new dating site and am wondering where the best place to start is? Does anyone have recommendations on a good script to use (open-source or pay for one). Also what are the good hosting companies that wont shut my site down if I get too much traffic? Thanks!!!!!|whisper|

If your idea is really unique, register the appropriate domain name and common variations / typos before you tell anyone about it.

The best place to start is to learn about existing dating sites, how they market themselves and figure out how you are going to position your own services relative to their services.

If you are looking for a plug-in script, your idea may not be as unique as you think.

As you're starting this idea from scratch, it's premature to worry about your site getting shut down from too much traffic. You're placing the cart before the horse.

Good luck.

Any good host will never shut you down because of traffic. Co-location, nationnet, mojohost, there are many. There are tons of dating scripts, abeldating and so many more. Just google dating scripts

My idea is very unique; I have searched for it a lot and have not found anything like it. If I can make a good site and market it properly I truly believe it will catch on in the proper community. I am looking for a plug-in script just because I don't know how to build one from scratch (but do know how to modify one) and I'm on limited funds right now (unemployment!!). I know it will take a while to get real traffic but I have read a lot about how much it sucks to move servers and how people have been shut down for inadvertently getting too much traffic. I'm very open to ideas though!!! :)

How do I know which scripts are better as there are so many of them, after looking for a while so many of them sound equally as good. And how do I tell the good servers (that wont shut you down due to traffic using too many resources) and the not-so-good ones? Thanks!!!

Can anybody recommened or slam BoonEx Dolphin 7? It looks pretty good!?!

This is only an issue if you're on a shared server and your heavy usage of shared resources negatively affects other customers on that server. If you're on a dedicated box, you have nothing to worry about.

Several clients run Boonex. First, don't do any customizations if you expect to stay anything close to recent on their upgrades? Their upgrade process is brutal, customizations make it much worse. If it does things out of the box that are pretty close to what you want, you'll be ok. Their programming services are reasonably inexpensive, their template design group is also fairly inexpensive.

However, if it doesn't do what you need, finding a programmer willing to work with it is tricky as it is a very complex product. If you don't mind working with them, they are somewhat responsive, and are able to make changes, but, are in Russia, and work on their schedule. So, you'll communicate, they work, email you back, you check it, and everything takes about 24 hours longer than expected.

Thanks for the info, any good ones you can recommend?

If it is close to what you want, it is about the most complete package out there. Anything else you do would be customizing Drupal or Joomla and using some of their available plugins and writing the bridge modules to do what you need. The advantage to Dolphin is that it contains the geolocation 'searches', their StreamRay product to allow videoconferencing between people, preferred lists, 'hot lists', etc.

If it doesn't do what you need, you're going to have to modify an existing CMS and write modules to handle the unique part. You need to figure out how close it is and the modifications that you would need versus using something that was less developed, but, perhaps more flexible.

Joomla isn't very easy on the person who wants to do heavy customization either, compared to Drupal. At the very least Drupal has a rather extensive amount of social networking modules to build off of.

Why don't you hire?
 

Why don't hire someone for designing and creating website. I am sure you can get a good designer and developer person at a cheap price.

I've been looking into comparing BoonEX, Drupal and Joomla. BoonEx Dolphin seems to have everything built in where it seems that Drupal and Joomla you just have to build yourself. Can you still use Drupal to do all the things Dolphin does without having to use their format?