AGTDenton

Hello web developers & designers!
I'll start by saying my last real website project was circa 2007/2008 so the landscape has changed dramatically since then!
I started to learn about web design / development in my school years, though schools back then didn't have an I.T. department, so it was largely at home.
My early days of web development began with the aid of Frontpage & Frontpage Express along with the best book at the time for HTML, HTML Goodies by Joe Burns, an incredible author in my view. A huge shame he retired a long time ago. But I can understand why, I remember for quite a few years it was chaotic; xhtml, shtml, php, asp, python, cold fusion and was HTML 5 ever going to arrive. Fun times! I eventually progressed to Dreamweaver but called it quits by 2008, I'm not the most proficient coder and found the pace impossible to keep up with, I sadly never saw it as a profession.
Today I am a complete novice but it's nice to see that I understand some HTML still. Poor Cold Fusion and Flash are nowhere to be seen.
I now seek advice, but will post in the appropriate forum.
Thanks!

Virtual server might do the job. The database could quickly grow as you can’t delete old vacancies. Clients will want to login and see all their listings as they may want to reuse copy.
And job seekers will want to see their application history so you will need to keep all their data intact.
marketing is still going to be your biggest cost though. It will dwarf the development and server costs.

Yes a cloud based elastic VPS should do the job, it can easily expanded as per requirement this will help the DB growth. On dedicated server upgrade would be much difficult without physical migration.

Should also mention you will need a dedicated server and a whole bunch of security measures. This will be at least £2k per year, could be a lot more. 
 
The business I worked with was spending around £1500/month on marketing.

Listings were free. They had plans for a subscription model but never got enough listings or applicants.
sponsorship only happens once you can show traffic. And by traffic I mean thousands of uniques per day. 
 
This is a seriously hard business to break into. The competition is huge, even for niche sectors. You will make more money selling tat on eBay.

Done a few of these and they have all failed. Not because of the website, that’s the easy bit. They failed because of the cost of marketing. It’s not cheap, it will consume every waking minute and it’s very difficult to get people to sign up.