I'm considering starting my own online dating service. What should I know, and how can I go about starting an endeavor like this?

Primarily you have to be an expert in the dating business to begin with or have a gift of being a good match maker. The misconception that many people have with online business is that they think that putting something on the internet will make it great and that it will be an easy way to be successful. You need a good dating service business model in order to be able to get the right people together and weed out the psycos and lunatics.

Secondly you need a good web designer and a good web hosting service. If you expect to get more than a couple of hundred visitors to your site, you will need a web hosting service that can accomodate the traffic and the database of participants. You might want to look into being your own web host and managing your own server.

Third, which is the most important- Marketing and advertising. It will take a very big advertising budget to be able to set yourself apart from the hundreds of other online dating services in existance.

So in summary it takes:
1. A good business model
2. A reliable method of running and managing the website
3. MONEY.

chances r not to b rude but theres alot u need to learn still to run a site of this magnatude i would recomend some serious reading on hosting a site etc the rest will fall into place and dont 4get the money

Will your internet dating website be international and for most people or special groups of people.
A friend of mine is doing well with her website you could take a look at some of her ideas www.ascotworld.com best of luck.

What Jack Scotty said is very reliable.
Also, and you most likely know this already, but here goes:
There are so many dating sites out there.
You have to convince your targets that your internet dating site is different and works the best for fantastic relationships.

Look at other dating sites. See how they are run. Why do you want to choose this? Because there is something about dating sites you want to change, or because you think it'd be a fun job and you like match-making?

Ask yourself these questions, because, as Jack said, what with the many dating sites out there, you'll have a hard job getting one started and then convincing others your site is good.
Good luck!

From what I have found there seems to be lots of sites for ablebodied people.
But not many free websites for disabled people.
EG:There are not many free websites in Australia for disabled persons.
I tried a few sites but they are full of yanks!
So I would check out the market first.
Best of luck.