How to setup a community based website?

I want to start a website. It will be a small community bases website. I can learned a fair bit of ruby on rails and am planning to use it. however, i have never made a real working website before. i wanted to know what are the things i need to get the website on the internet. what is the best place to get a domain name and web hosting. what are these Amazon EC2 etc things. how are they different from other web hosts. what else might i need to do to deploy a website. also i may happen to have a fair bit of users in the future. how to sites like twitter, fmylife.com all go about these things.

First a foremost, if you want to have a website that is as complex as Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, etc and have it work as well as these sites, you will really want to look into having a professional web development company take this on as it's a very complex process and they will have a team to deliver this product to you.

Before I begin, I would like to point out that absolutely none of this is a solicitation of any kind, but merely suggestions based on my experience. What you choose to do will be at your own free will. (Covering myself in case Yahoo! Answers tries to erase my answer)

If you insist on doing this yourself, you will need many things: A content management system (CMS), a domain name and web host that supports the CMS of choice, you will need a number of designer programs (Graphic editors like Photoshop and Illustrator) and some kind of processing software to make it into a usable template if you plan to make a custom template for your site, and of course experience in HTML, CSS, and other programming languages.

For a community based website, I suggest using Joomla! as it comes with a free community builder add on (not all add ons are free). I also will give you an introductory video to Joomla! so that you may see what it is and what it does.

What Is Joomla!?

Community Builder (Explains what this extension is capable of)

Community Builder Configuration (Brief idea of what everything does, check out this guy's YouTube profile as he has several other videos on this):

Creating custom templates for Joomla! (shows you how to implement custom templates, this is not free):

Web Hosting Suggestions (domains are included - be sure to be on a Linux server, otherwise Joomla! cannot be installed):

1&1 Internet

http://order.1and1.com/xml/order/Hosting;jsessionid=EF243CD9618858C58D2DC595246E0AF9.TCpfix141b?__frame=_top&__lf=Static&linkId=hd.nav.domains&linkType=txt&linkOrigin=Home

Web Hosting Pad

http://www.webhostingpad.com/

Joomla! website for download (if you so choose):

http://www.joomla.org/

Again, these are just suggestions based on my experience. You should feel free to look around the web for other options. If you don't feel comfortable with Joomla! (YouTube has a lot of Joomla! demonstration videos, check it out), there are other CMS out there (WordPress, Drupal, etc.). WordPress is more for blogging and Drupal is similar to Joomla!, but I don't know as much about them or if they have as many extensions like what you're looking for.

You will also need to do a lot of learning about how to do these things if you're not already familiar. Again, I would say it's best just to hire a professional service.

Hopefully this was helpful to you.

Amazon AWS How To Get started with EC2 and S3 Cloud Computing Platform.