Thanks, i was giving grbrren some things which he might want to look for when choosing a host. But you know that it's not just the number of listings, but how many things you have for every listing and how you keep them in the database. If you have a row for every listing, that means you'll have around 20 000 rows in the database. That should work preety fast on most of the hosts. You have to check out how you want to keep them in the database.

Thank you, everyone, for the information and for sharing your knowledge. Every bit helps in bringing things together.

I really want to try working with the raw data feed but am still somewhat unsure of how MLS provides the data and how I would go about automating the process to get that data into my DB every night or however often it is updated. Any tips or guidance is appreciated.

Thanks all!

You can check out with the mls provider to see how often they make the file with listings. About how they export the listings, probabily you could check it out with them. You should give them a call and ask if they can give you some files with listings, which you can work on(like files with just some listings but having their layout so you can check it out). Give them a call and ask about those.