By drupalataccount on

Could drupal handle a social networking site that is as big as Facebook? If not, how big do you think it could handle?

What would be involved if I had to start a social networking site (with authenticated accounts but no user generated content except for a picture) using drupal and a standard hosting company, and at first it only had say 3000 members. But then in a matter of months it grew to several million. Would you have to buy your own servers when it got big, or switch to another hosting company, or switch to a new CMS? Would the site have some down time?

What happens when all of a sudden a site gets a whole lot of visitors in a short period of time? Would it crash, and if so, is this because of the hosting and not drupal? I guess this would be a terrible thing to happen to a startup internet company just as it was gaining popularity. So how do you avoid it?

I know this is a lot of questions, but if you have any advice it would be much appreciated. I am kind of new to all this.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

alex.ihlo’s picture

alex.ihlo commented

Yeah Drupal could do it, shared hosting would work great for this, one of the $4.95/month hosts work great because they are unlimited bandwidth! Go for it!

aitala’s picture

aitala commented

Hehe... you're funny.

:D

Eric

__________
Eric Aitala - ema13@psu.edu
Penn State

224b8605113373e086cb27708ff301ba18ce394db1996e7e22928e4555e0d20b1b6cecc7f67c9bd9e536cb915779c485

alpinejag’s picture

alpinejag commented

It would help if you owned your own data center, Facebook has several to handle that number of users.

waystar’s picture

waystar commented

Your questions are too generalized and unrealistic. They cannot be answered due to unlimited variables. You need to read read read and try to understand all the pieces to the puzzle. There are many.

But hey I am not against anyone biting off more than they can chew:) I like big thinkers.

glennr’s picture

glennr commented

OK, some of those specific questions may be unrealistic, but the underlying questions are valid. I'm no Drupal performance expert, but from the little research I've done:

Firstly, I don't know about Facebook but Drupal can handle a lot of traffic. Check out the case studies and guides here: http://drupal.org/node/326504.

Regarding resources: it's not difficult for a Drupal site to outgrow shared hosting, in which case you'd need to go to (or start with) a VPS or dedicated server. If the site starts getting really serious traffic, you'll have to invest heavily in hardware/hosting and, just as importantly, Drupal experts to optimize servers, databases, caching, code, etc.

How much traffic exactly? I wouldn't have clue, but I suspect that, as waystar says, there are too many variables to give a definitive answer.

Further reading:
http://2bits.com/contents/articles
http://groups.drupal.org/high-performance

If you really think your site has a good chance of generating serious traffic, see this thread for some good advice: http://groups.drupal.org/node/22471.