Amy Lawrence, the owner of Random Walk Shoes, has asked you tohelp her as she launches her company’s first Web site. In college,Amy was a business major with an artistic bent. She helped to payher way through college by decorating sneakers with herhand-painted designs. Her business grew through word of mouth andthrough her participation in crafts fairs. By the time she earnedher degree, Amy was running a successful business from her dormroom. Amy expanded her sales efforts to include crafts fairs innearby towns. She hired two college students to work for her, andshe convinced several area gift shops to stock samples of hermerchandise. The gift shops were not an ideal retail outlet for herproducts, however, since most people who want to buy decoratedsneakers want to choose specific designs or have special designscreated just for them. Customers also want to choose the specificshoes on which the design is placed. One of Amy’s student workerssuggested that she consider selling her products on the Web.Realizing that the Web would give Random Walk Shoes a chance toreach a much wider audience and would allow customers to choosedesign-shoe combinations, Amy began gathering information anddeveloping estimates about her planned Web activity. Using herdigital camera, she took several hundred pictures of shoes,designs, and shoe-design combinations. She then hired a local Webdesigner to create sample pages for the Web site, including catalogpages that contained the digital images. She also created a numberof videos showing the customized sneakers in action. When the Webdesigner had completed a prototype of the site, Amy worked with thedesigner to calculate page sizes (including the images). Theaverage page size was 1 MB. She also calculated the average size ofa video to be 800 MB. Amy and her employees then navigated theprototype site several hundred times to develop an estimate of howmany pages an average visitor would download and how many videosthey would watch. They concluded that an average site visitor wouldvisit 23 pages and watch one video during each visit. Amy workedwith the Web designer to develop estimates of the activity theyexpect to occur on the Web site during its first two years ofoperation. These estimates include: • The database of Web pageinformation (including the images and the videos) will requireabout 1 TB of disk space. • The database management software itselfwill require about 500 MB of disk space. • The shopping cartsoftware will require about 300 MB of disk space. • About 8000customers will visit the site during the first month, and sitetraffic will grow about 20 percent each month during the first twoyears. • The site should accommodate a peak traffic load of 1000visitors at one time. Amy wants to include features on the sitethat are similar to those found on competing sites (a list of linksto businesses that sell customized shoes on the Web is included inthe Web Links for your reference). Amy wants the site to provide agood experience for visitors. If the site is successful, it willgenerate sufficient revenue to allow an upgrade after two years.However, she does not want to spend more money than is necessary toget the site up and keep it running for the next two years.

Determine the features and capacities (RAM, diskstorage, processor speed) that Amy should include in the Web servercomputer she will need for her site. Summarize your purchaserecommendation in a one-page memorandum to Amy. You may includeinformation from vendors' sites (such as Dell, Hewlett Packard, orSun) as an appendix to your memorandum.

Please note: a recommendationfor external hosting without specific features and capacitiesrequired is not acceptable.

Your finished assignment will include a 1-page memo to Amysummarizing your purchase recommendations.