There Will Be Blood… from your Server
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If your reaction to my last post was “screw you” or words to that effect, and you plan on running a site that will attract large amounts of traffic without a business model, you will 
suffer as Twitter has suffered. But in your case, users will probably never see your cutesy version of the fail whale. Your server will be so busy, backlogged, and exhausted of threads that it will not even be able to serve it. When you get to that point and want to expand to more boxes, it will be constant game of catch-up. Now if you have a good set of servers in the beginning and can see as things get rapidly worse, you’ll be in good shape to get some funding when you boast of your staggering traffic. Some companies aren’t so lucky. In the age of Twitter and Facebook where you’re one famous person’s update away from getting pounded, having the niche as your audience will save you.
When someone imagines a business idea that launches a startup, many times it’s a “big play” – which means it’s a large idea that will need many people to build, and will likely serve a huge market. Such ideas cost a lot of money. And you’ll either need a lot of up-front invested capital or revenue on the first day to help fund it. And you’ll need to have a certain amount of capacity built-in so that your site isn’t always down.
So you’re a businessperson and you have a great idea but you know nothing of the IT nerd world. Or you’re the nerd but have no business acumen. Here’s a great video segment on finding someone to fill in your partnership.
Back when I did my first startup, we were pretty hardcore about data privacy. We had an overpriced SSL certificate, we encrypted credit cards and other customer data, encoded our PHP code with Zend Encoder, and disallowed SSH connections except from specific IPs. We were in charge of security.
Back when my startups were under the radar, I wanted to display a mailing address on my contact pages, but not my home address, of course. My assumption is that a mailing address gives customers the impression that you have an office somewhere, even though you’re actually working from a folding table in your living room.