thanks @Jack Simone yeah probably best to DIY the host lol. and thanks @Zet Man. its been a fun, interesting and stressful process to figure out OSSN LOL but its all completely worth it! you guys have built awesome stuff here. Im hoping next year ill get to help support you guys by buying premium and some components. Heres a little Insight of what i have done to my site in photo below :P yes STICKERS LIKE FACEBOOK!!! =D

@Stefan Yeap.... If you have ability to manage your own server, then it will be good option to host it on your own server. If you choose shared hosting, there are many limitations, if you purchase VPS from Godaddy, they are not good enough and you might stressed out because of their support. hehe....

> But also i dont know if OSSN can read the ossn_data directory if its
> on another machine?

Well, since Ossn isn't doing any File I/O directly but everything is routed through PHP, the question is: How good/fast/reliably is PHP's handling of network drives.

That said, basically Ossn wouldn't notice whether the data 'directory' is in fact a real existing physical volume on the same machine or a directory mounted by NFS for example.

So far for the theory, and I'm afraid you'll be very much on your own if you really want to explore all the switches, quirks and possibilities that come along with these kind of network drives. (I'm just remembering that 20 years ago my 16 Mhz AIX server was outperforming a 300 Mhz Linux machine with default settings, and it took days of trying this and trying that until I got a comparable NFS performance with the Linux box. :) )

@Jack Simone Thanks. going by some of the sites and limitations will probably end up just buying a good web server to host at home. have stable internet just not the hardware yet. My biggest issue with hosts is either they limit storage or bandwidth or hosting multiple sites on one machine. But also i dont know if OSSN can read the ossn_data directory if its on another machine for extra storage. i use separate machine for the site and database. but dunno about storage for photos and files. some reason i like to try keep everything separate for clean work-space lol. my OCD works in mysterious ways

I wouldn't recommend godaddy. You can find other alternative. If you are based in UK, you can try hostforlife.eu. The advantages using their services, you can select many data centers in Europe.

oh :/ was looking at some VPS services. just didn't like the bandwidth limitations and storage/price . I know will probably never use that up. Just my fussiness with limitations. Final Option would be to buy my own server to host here instead of using my main desktop. seems that may just be the option

Godday isn''t good for OSSN, you can run VPS in less then price of godday see https://hostingandvps.com/billing/cart.php