Which level of DoS protection is best to start off with for a startup building a social network from the ground up?

In a word: Forensics. Computer forensics is the art of examining a system and determining what happened upon it previously. The examination of file and memory artifacts, especially file timelines, can paint a very clear picture of what the attacker did, when they did it, and what they took. Just as an example - given a memory dump of a Windows system, it is possible to extract not only the command lines typed by an attacker, but also the output that they saw as a result of running those commands. Pretty useful in determining impact, eh? Depending on the freshness of the compromise, it's possible to tell quite a lot about what happened.

The reality is "reputable" growth hackers - aren't sitting around on freelance sites waiting for you to hire them. If they are good, they are either (very) gainfully employed at a reputable company making very good salaries or more likely using our super powers to create multimillion dollar companies. So the bad news is there is no platform where you can hire reputable growth hackers BUT here is what you can do: You can borrow some of their time on here for just a few dollars a minute and learn what you need to learn to do it yourself (or at least get started) or find courses to learn "growth hacking" yourself. Get the tips, learn the techniques, tons of free resources and sites too. Unfortunately there are no silver bullets and very seldom magic hires that will suddenly get you growth. It's a painful, iterative long process. And the term growth hacker is very broad. Some of us can help you with SEO/SEM, email list building, partnerships and PR (I'm heavily specialized in PR). TL:DR Talk to specialized growth hackers, learn, and apply the techniques yourself.

Godaddy is pain for developers and technical people, as it is set up for simple things. You can use any good hosting companies or any cloud servers. But if you need to talk to a human godaddy is a good option. Scalability will not be an issue with Godaddy, as they can sell you any infrastructure when you grow bigger.

I have a tremendous amount of experience sending emails from new domains - perhaps 2,000,000 emails per year - and the long and short of it is this: email deliverability is tremendously complex. Why? For one thing, because of the constant battle between spammers, ISPs, ESPs and other players, among other things. Also, because email still uses some very old and outdated protocols that make this all more difficult. If your business is going to rely heavily on email, I would encourage to educate yourself now so that you won't be stymied as you grow. Many of the things I learned were through trial and error - which can be excruciatingly frustrating. Just a few of the things you should immediately begin working on: proper SPF, SenderID, DKIM compliance along with solid DNS set up. Additionally, if you will use email heavily, I would start now putting the pieces in place for later white labeling aa nd possible dedicated IP sending. In terms of the actual email content itself, that is another subject you will want to investigate. I'm not saying these things to discourage you - but rather to help you avoid the mistakes we made in the past. If you need a hand getting a little grip on this I probably can steer you in the right direction pretty quickly. Wish you the best in your endeavor! Adam

If you feel that Clarity isn’t secure enough for your needs, you’re welcome to use another platform. Also, if you have something that’s extremely private, your welcome to use another platform. Clarity is a great platform with great customer support. I’ve needed them numerous times and they’ve always been super responsive and helpful. I only wish they promoted the platform even more. Good luck