Hi,

If you are serious about starting such a website and maintain it, you might want to consider a full time programmer instead of contracting the work to another development company or a freelancer. Such website will need constant updating of the features, addons or bug fixes.

As for hosting wise, i would suggest to start with at least a VPS and move on to a dedicated server when the need comes. You can also consider to start right from a dedicated server. Depending on the requirements you have for your resource usage. Do look into the amount of bandwidth you need as well. It is an important factor. A website that takes long to load will turn visitors away.

Regards,
Derrick Goh
sgWebster Solutions Pte Ltd