[AlexMuir]

I learnt to code when I set up almost exactly the same business ten years ago - http://www.thebigspace.co.uk

I built it in PHP and MySQL and there was no MVC for me. It was a mess. It's been completely rewritten at least three times, and is due another rewrite.

For about the first five of those years, the hosting cost £10 per year, and £2.50 for the domain name. I believe the site now uses a small part of a Linode $20/month VPS.

It's a fun business, but virtually impossible to scale. Good luck.

[keithpeter]

Neato

How do the students estimate the number of items?

Back when I was a student (we used to chase geese to get feathers to make pens in those days) my most difficult to manage possessions were books. Several hundred of them.

[AlexMuir]

They just order what they reckon and are usually 10-15% under what they thought. We charged for what we actually stored so it worked out fine.

Books and clothes are now the core of the business. When we started people all had hifis, 14" TVs, VCRs/DVD players, desktop computers, CRT monitors, boxes of CDs and DVDs - all that has gone now. And books will probably be largely gone in five years.

[keithpeter]

Sorry, the Web form only allows 15 items max. Do books count as a single item or lots of items?

Note: I teach maths to teenagers. This business could form a nice interesting project for them, one that they could actually understand the logic of. I live at least 5 degrees of latitude below Dundee!

[AlexMuir]

Books go in a box. Choose the size of box to accomodate the books. Don't do what everyone does and put all the heavy books in one box and all the bedding in the remaining five.

[keithpeter]

Even better: here is a box. How many 'average' library books can you fit into it.

Seriously, put a 'functional skills maths ideas' page up there and you'll get tonnes of teachers linking to the page.