PixelPure

I agree with wesh. You should always base your servers as close to your target clients as possible. This, as he said, will provide the fastest output speed of the server. Furthermore, most clients would rather be hosted in their own country to show support and for familiarity.

"Cloud" hosting is a tricky one, because it's often misused (abused?) as a marketing slogan. In my opinion, true "cloud" hosting means separating data storage from processing, and billing everything as a utility - i.e. in units of processing, bandwidth and storage consumed per minute or hour. The advantages of "clouds" are supposed to be increased performance, resiliency and ease of upgrade - but your mileage on this will vary depending on who the cloud provider is. Many hosts sell simple "VPS" or "VDS" solutions as clouds, when really they are neither billing as a utility, nor have central storage (instead, your data is on the hard drive in the same box as the computational node). Clouds tend to be more expensive than a "simple" VPS solution, because of the benefits of utility billing and easier upgrade routes.
 
In general, it should be easy to upgrade the CPU allowance and/or RAM on any virtual solution. However, by their nature, a virtual solution is shared. If your project really takes off, you will probably want to move to a dedicated solution so you aren't sharing network ports and I/O channels.
 
A dedicated server is pretty easy to upgrade in terms of bandwidth, RAM or CPU - the latter involves taking the hard drives out of one chassis and putting them in another... a 20 minute job, but straightforward. We've done them in late evenings/overnight before, to minimise disruption for clients.
 
Moving from a virtual solution to a dedicated server is doable but isn't trivial - you essentially have to clone one to the other, but have possible issues to overcome with drivers, partition sizes etc. The ease also depends on the OS (generally it's easier to do complex things with Linux than Windows).
 
Also, bear in mind that with any dedicated server or virtual server solution, you can run as many websites as you like on it... you have full control, so can be sure no other sites are unknowingly slowing yours down. It can be a good financial move to consolidate any existing sites, if you have any, on to a single dedicated box

As close to its audience as possible. In your case, anywhere in the UK would be fine, but a seperate site/hosting package for the US would be worth considering, possibly on a sub.domain.
 
Why? Simple, no lag times for visitors, and the best possible search ranking results for those searching for what your website has to offer. Finding non-oversold hosting however, well, that will be a headache, especially in the US!

If it's skills in Photoshop and the like that you are looking for then, tutsplus is awesome!
 
If you are looking to start building up your skill base to be a graphic designer, then I'd definitely start with learning the basics of good typography. It's fundamental to everything in design and without mastering that, you will struggle to make it far in the design world.
 
Best of luck.
 
-----------------
Web Design Yorkshire

Quit quit quit trying to create it from scratch in your graphics program.
 
Start by sketching up as many designs on paper. Then work from there.

I still feel as if you are trying to force this logo to look good. Drop all effects (drop shadows, strokes, and yes even the color" work on the form of the logo instead of something to make it "oomph" To me none of your proposed logos do it for me. Doesn't seems as there is much thought in the placement of the letters, just kinda random alignments of letters because they have an ascender or descender.
 
Try different fonts as well. This one looks like a crappy freebie.

Have to agree on the stars, they don't look right. Maybe because they have a worn effect where the text doesn't.

95% of the time, an idea is just an idea. You can't copyright it, or even patent it. You can only patent something like an invention as far as I am aware.
 
Take courier services for instance; that is just a basic business idea right... collect goods from one location, and deliver the same goods to another location. That is a business idea... but nobody has patented the idea.
 
You can effectively 'copy' any business idea, as long as you execute it in your own way.

Well you have to make a judgment call to be honest mate - if the business IS the site - then you may have a problem; if the business is only heightened by the site, then you are fine. Take Facebook as an example - they were not the first, nor will they be the last social networking site. It is near enough impossible to claim the rights over an idea alone

it depends if they have trademarked/copyright the idea or not.

I think it's fine to be inspired by another website's concept.
 
But just be wary that you don't copy anything, as you will be stealing intellectual property.