Every once in a while I am tempted to try to turn one of my hobbies
into a business; one recent example would be a photo gallery
hosting service. (and related software)

But that kind of thing seems fairly expensive to do (lots of cpu,
disk, bandwidth needed), and I bet supporting a site like this
would become a full-time job fairly quickly, so I doubt I'll get
around to it, except maybe on a very small scale. (start with
friends, grow as time permits?)

One of the best existing sites I know about is PBase; I just
dropped by to get some photo stylesheet ideas, and I'm amazed
how quickly it has been growing:

> 24-Jan-2003 - 8809005 photos online.
>
> 23-Dec-2002 - PBase switches to a required payment system. [...]
>               7,271,206 photos online
>
> 28-Nov-2002 - Another 2.4TeraBytes of disk space installed.
>               6.2million photos online.
>
> 18-Sep-2002 - 3,940,094 photos online.
>
> 29-Jul-2002 - 2,718,430 photos.
>
> 05-Mar-2002 - Over one million photos now on pbase.

   -- http://www.pbase.com/

I don't see how they could be profitable yet since they only
recently switched to a required payment system. (they were
only accepting donations before, I think)

They seem to have some fairly expensive hardware up already:

| PBASE was conceived in July of 1999 after observing countless camera
| wielding people that take cool photos but find it difficult to share
| their work.
|
| It was up and running by August,1999 at photobase.org with basic
| features.
|
| I soon realized that this was definitely not a novel idea but here's
| my version anyway.
| -slug
|
| PBASE originally ran on jomo, a dual Intel Pentium II 350Mhz machine
| with 768MB Ram.
| 26-May-2001 - junga - Now it is running on a dual Intel PIII 1Ghz
| machine, 1GB RAM, and a U160 SCSI RAID.
| 21-Jun-2001 - Crank that up to 2GB RAM
| Nov-2001 - jaro - Add a SuperMicro 6010H dual 1Ghz server with 4GB ram.
| 08-Mar-2002 - jogo - Dell PE2550, dual 1.4Ghz p3, 4GB ram.
| 08-Mar-2002 - ji - Dell PE1550 dual 1.26Ghz p3, 4GB ram
| 20-Mar-2002 - jala - Dell PE1650 dual 1.26Ghz p3, 2GB ram
| 15-Aug-2002 - jama,jenki,jinko - Three Dell PE1650s dual 1.4Ghz
| p3, 2GB ram, and a Cisco Local Director 416 load balancer
| There are also four single CPU machines ranging from 1Ghz PIII to
| 1.7Ghz P4 CPUs that are dedicated to serving nothing but thumbnails.
| Each of them serve about 2million thumbnail images per day.
| Dec-2002 - pbase is now using about 8 terabytes of storage.
|
| The operating system is Linux. Red Hat distribution.
| The web server is Apache using mod_perl
| The site is programmed using Perl using many modules from CPAN
| Development environment: a bunch of xterms and vi

:)

| Image processing done with ImageMagick
| Code management by CVS
| EXIF data extraction was done using exifdump.py written by Thierry Bousch
| Now done with a program called jhead written in C by Matthias Wandel.
| Graphics manipulated by Adobe Photoshop on an Apple Macintosh G3
|
| All products mentioned on this page are trademarked by their
| respective owners.

-- http://www.pbase.com/server_info

--
Gerald Oskoboiny <[email protected]>
http://impressive.net/people/gerald/