I currently have a business idea for a website but I don't want to ask for anybody's help nor hire anybody to build this. I'd rather start building it as a small website and grow it out myself, eventually start a limited company and monetize the site.
Without giving too much detail, it's a website dealing with written fiction. I believe my idea is (mostly) original; as in there are competitors on the market but nowhere near as efficient and convenient for users and content providers.
I have minor experience in PHP and MySQL (and that was in a school project a few years ago). I want to seriously attempt to build this website. What would I need to learn? How long would it take me to learn it? If I wanted to aim for having thousands of users in the first few weeks or months, how expensive would web hosting be? And which programming/scripting languages and tools should I be using?