[stomachmonkey]

Kevin,

You DO NOT want to run your own servers for ecomm. If you are accepting credit cards you do not want the security risk.

Tech, it's not all about saving coin but there are other ways to deal with uptime that can be cheaper, more flexible and more reliable than Rackspace.

One of my fav's is DNS hosting. Most people make the mistake of using the ISP's primary and secondary DNS servers only.

I run 6 DNS entries for every domain. I keep the servers mirrored and they are grouped at different ISP's and also geographically separated.

If I keep 2 servers at an ISP on the east coast and 2 on the west coast I limit susceptibility to network outages. If a piece of hardware goes down (which has happened only 1x in 12 years) I don't sweat it because the boxes are mirrored and DNS hosting gives me fall over.

Traffic on the boxes is not consistent, the products have a season and the TV advertising reflects that. We regularly get pieces on Good Morning America and I know the traffic will spike. So again since the boxes are mirrored I can run load balancing scripts instead of paying for a full time hardware load balancer that I would only need 20 days out of the year.

The real answer to the question is what is the product and how will he drive demand to the site and what kind of traffic does he expect. No reason to go in the hole by spending more on servers that he will make from sales.

Put another way if he is delivering single pizzas to houses he only needs a car, not an 18 wheeler.