Dedicated Server For Swoopo Style Website

[nightkarnation]

Hey Guys!

I am currently creating a website that will do pretty much what Swoopo does.

 

I am creating the engine with Flash (Actionscript 3.0) + Php + Mysql.

 

My question is the following:

 

I know I need a dedicated server in order to handle the big amount of queries and have the queries process faster than they would with a shared server, right?

I would like to have some suggestions on what kind of Dedicated Server I should be looking for and any specific tip to have faster queries.

For example I was told that the Battery Backed-up unit, allows to activate write-caching and greatly speed disk access, which is needed for fast queries

Is this true?

 

Thanks a lot for any help and/or suggestions!

Cheers!