so i've been working on a website on and off for about a year now, and i'm finally at a point where it's functional enough to test out in a sort of private beta (not ready for live release). but i never thought about the correct process for doing this and what things i need to take care of. i've never released a public website before. some of the questions/concerns i have in mind:

1) is it against my MSDN license agreement to release a website using the software? 2) how do i protect my "idea"? is it a bad idea to find random people you don't know to test out your site? can you make them digitally sign some sort of NDA? 3) i'm using some open source code - any proper way to release open source code to live production? 4) how much traffic can a place like discountasp.net handle anyway? can hosting sites generally handle large volume of traffic?

any comments/suggestions regarding the proper/safe way to release a public website would be appreciated. i've been working on this for a while and never actually sat down to think about the right way to move from a personal side project to a live production website.