Q:

A servers hardware and software for a new startup

We are a new startup, and we don't have much money right now, but we want to invest what we should.
We building a website that will let users to upload pictures, and have a galleries. It's very unique website, but we can't, of course, give more details here. We expect a lot of users as we progress.
The site is build on top of ASP.NET MVC, Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Server 2008 R2.
We don't sure what hardware do we need to run all this staff. We don't sure either how to get the licence for this staff and for what version. We don't have much money right now, but I want to know what I have to get.
The path is to have a nice cluster, to support it all, but we may start with one good server, that will be run all, and then add a new specific servers to a cluster. If you choose this path, what hardware would it be?
Or we may start with hosting, to run it all at the beginning. If we will choose this path, can you recommend the hardware that can support it all?

A:

As others have said, it largely depends on how important uptime is to you, but I'd definitely consider getting someone who really knows their beans to sort out the hosting for you (and take the responsibility of keeping everything up!). This would also most likely provide a more extensible system, at least until you're fairly stable and have some sort of usage data to give an idea of what sort of spec machines you'll need.
Have you considered Microsoft Bizspark as a way of getting the software licenses you'll need, for both hosting if you go down that route, and development tools? Jeff blogged about it here.

A:

Given this is appears to be purely for dev work and you have no idea on the overall performance requirements I'd suggest just getting a cheapo little Dell desktop tower thing (something like THIS) knowing that it'll do the job for a short while but be cheap and that you will outgrow it soon, but you'll have more understanding by then.

