Create Website using own Webserver?

Hallo.
Lets say I want to open up a small social networking website //link removed, it would be alright to sign up with a web hosting client such as 1&1.com if the amount of users and monthly web traffic is not to high right? But lets say //link removed becomes a success and the web traffic booms, maybe 10 million hits per week (or more) and 1 mill users. If I am right it is necessary to have your own servers to keep up with the web traffic required. Now I do not know much about servers and what I want to find out is what sort of server would be right for this case. What servers did websites like Facebook ore others use when they started up? And does it have to be expensive to set up servers that can deal with a high amount of webtraffic and hold a lot of files ( well not like youtube or so, but maybe 200 mb per user)? You know something that can be expanded if required.

Now I know it is not an easy task to set up your own web server and such and it requires a lot of knowledge, but it is nothing you cannot learn.

What I have already found out is that you would have to ensure that the internet connection is fast (in terms of Upload Speed) lets say T1 or higher, and that it is always on, to ensure the server can be accessed at all time. You will also need to have a Server (Hardware and Software).

I have read a number of articles online saying that it is easier and cheaper to sign up with a web hosting company, but not in this case or?
And just out of curiosity, How much web space (in terms of terabytes or whatever) does a website such as facebook or myspace have or need.

I am not a big fan of 1&1 servers i have to say, their support is very slow and their techs dont seem to know much about anything.

You are probably right now on the shared hosting, so yeah while the site is running it should be OK (server should handle everything) once it starts getting a lot of hits, you might want to do a small upgrade towards a vps so it can handle the traffic, usually vps's come with control panel so its all pre-setup for you, all you gotta do is just migrate your web files and databases to it.

If the size of the site gets too big (traffic wise) and the vps can no longer handle it, then it would be best to then upgrade to a dedicated server, there are two types of dedicated servers you can get, either the managed one or the unmanaged, in your case you wanna go for the managed one or become partners with someone who is technical so you save some money and go for the unmanaged server.

The size of facebook and myspace are just too big. They have already created clusters of servers to hold all the information we are now talking about data center type of size of clusters. So its a bit too advanced. I presume that facebook generates around 1TB if not more on a daily basis (photos, videos, apps, text).
Their cluster expands from USA to UK and Netherlands.

Contact me so we can discuss this further, I can help with bandwidth and space if thats what you need.
We can go through upgrade plans and so on.

Let me know where you are located as well please.

In my opinion, purchasing web hosting from a company is easier than running a webserver on your computer. Many ISPs (Internet Service Provider) block port 80 these days (the port which lets you view sites) . If they don't block it, then they probably have something in their ToS saying you can't host anything willy nilly.
A simple website shouldn't take more than 100 MB; a networking site can get bigger with time. a few gigabyrtes should keep you going for a while. Many hosting companies offer cheap rates which are worth the money to cut frustration and electricity bills.