Hello and welcome! First thing first, tokays are very active geckos and in the wild they have quite a bit of territory that they carve out and keep other males out of it. So you will need at least a 20 gallon tall tank for one large tokay. For a couple of them, you will need at least a 29 gallon. I keep my single female tokay in a 29 gallon tall tank, and she is doing great. You might consider getting a 29 gallon, too, if you are getting one because they do quite a bit of walking at night and the extra room will allow for good excercise and better temperature gredient. I think a 29 gallon is definitely better than a 20 gallon. And, yes, you can put the tank on its side so it will stand taller, but I don't do that, so maybe somebody else can advise you on that. When you get the tank, I would situated it on a tall stand to give your the gecko a bit of height to look down. They like it better. For me I keep the cage simple. I put in some bricks for it to climb on and hide in and put plenty crickets in the cage every week before I turn off the light. Be sure to feed your prey insects very well before you feed them to your tokay. I usually feed my crickets crushed good quality dog kibbles to the crickets. You can also use chick mash, or chick start, and tropical fish flakes. All these food are high in protein and are laced with essential vitamins and minerals that the crickets need. They will pass on the nutritient to your tokay. It is essential that you powerfeed such prey items if your tokay is going to survive for years to come. Other food item that have been fed to these guys are live pinky and fuzzy mice. I have never actually fed mine these food, but it is good source of food since it is whole prey items and is rich in protein, vitamins, and minerals, and therefore nutritionally balanced. Becareful, if you fed them too much of these to your tokay because it will become obese. Another important point you ought to know is tokay will not drink from a water dish. So you have to spray all the sides of the enclosure every night before you turn off the light and your tokay will lap up the water from the walls. Another way to give them water, which I do most of the time, is I wait until after I turn off the light for my tokay to come out and then I put a lot of ice on top of the screen right above where she is. When she notices water dripping, she will often walk up the screen and lap up the water from the melting ice. I do this almost every night and my tokay loves the water. For substrate I find newspaper to be the cheapest and easiest to clean. I just take it out the soil newspaper and vaccum up any remain poop and dead cricket debris about once a week. I actually don't handle my tokay during cleaning. I let her stay in the hide and move it around to get all the newspapers out and vaccum the cage. I tried handling her once and she bit be pretty hard, and I started bleeding quite a bit. To tell you truth it didn't hurt that much, but the sight of blood kindda scares me. Anyway, here is a good link to a very good tokay caresheet. Check it out!
http://www.anapsid.org/tokays.html
