what's the correct way to release a new website?

Question

so i've been working on a website on and off for about a year now, and i'm finally at a point where it's functional enough to test out in a sort of private beta (not ready for live release). but i never thought about the correct process for doing this and what things i need to take care of. i've never released a public website before. some of the questions/concerns i have in mind:

1. is it against my MSDN license agreement to release a website using the software?
2. how do i protect my "idea"? is it a bad idea to find random people you don't know to test out your site? can you make them digitally sign some sort of NDA?
3. i'm using some open source code - any proper way to release open source code to live production?
4. how much traffic can a place like discountasp.net handle anyway? can hosting sites generally handle large volume of traffic?

any comments/suggestions regarding the proper/safe way to release a public website would be appreciated. i've been working on this for a while and never actually sat down to think about the right way to move from a personal side project to a live production website.

Answer 1

You have a big number of questions in this question, but I'll try to address your four items.

1. The answer to this is going to depend on what MDSN license level you have, but if it is a regular subscription you are not going to have any problems deploying an application that you built. But you want to be sure to check your license agreement to be sure that you don't have anything that might prevent you from creating "Commercial Software"

2. This can really depend, for example when they launched StackOverflow they just kept it to a private beta, limiting the number of users that come in. You could do that, otherwise, you could look into an electronic NDA or similar, but for that you are going to want to consult a legal advisor to see if that is even feasible.

3. Again, this is going to depend on the Open Source software and if they have any rules/regulations on how you can use/deploy the software, you will need to consult their license agreement for details.

4. This is going to depend on all too many factors, size of the site, number of users, database load, hosting plan selected, etc..