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By GotMals on
we are going to launch a social networking site where we hope to gain 5 million users. obviously there is a ramp up period, so immediately that kind of support is not necessary but we hope to be there fairly quickly.
can i get your recommendations on what kind of server hosting is recommended for:
1) 0 - 100K users?
2) 100 - 500K users?
3) 500K+ users?
keep in mind we will need to ramp up as the user base increases but dont want to shoot ourselves in the foot from the get-go.
Comments
A couple of things
The issue is not so much how many users you are going to have, but how many concurrent users you are going to have. What kind of services are you offering up and how much bandwidth will they need. How much data do you expect to store? If you are expecting to obtain over 500K users and serve up a lot of content you are getting into the arena where a you are will most likely require dedicated servers or your own cluster whether it be Xen, VMware, etc.
There are providers out there that will do that for you, be prepared that many may expect you purchase the equipment yourself.
Some of the cloud hosting companies have some offerings that would work for you but they can get rather spendy.
I suppose the bottom line is to choose a company that can accommodate growth. That last thing you want to have to do is hit a wall where a provider can't service you and you have to take the site offline to move it.
exactly - shouldve been more
exactly - shouldve been more specific as to the number of concurrent users.
the services we plan to offer is basically those of your standard social networking site, image host, video host, profiles, etc. so there would be lots of data store for the users for sure and serving up content quickly.
Okay
So are you going to convert people's mpg's, etc to flash for them? That's the usual practice and if so it sounds like you are looking at two separate servers or virtual instances. So you will most likely need one box for handling the web content and one for performing ancillary tasks such as video conversion. I'm not a drupal expert and I don't know how all this should get plugged together within drupal, but you will probably need a host with a NAS head or some type of NFS services available. How much bandwidth you'll actually need remains to be seen because it's unknown how much content you plan on putting on a page.
There are much better informed people than me here to tell you how drupal works. I'm an infrastructure person and beyond this I can't really give you any accurate answers on drupal will play into this. I'm sure that there are some great people here that do contract work of this very type if you don't have someone. All I can tell you is that if you're planning on something where you'll have 500K+ users and over 1K online at a time you're going to get involved with proxy servers, load balancers and a lot of things you may need to consider.
Hope that helped a little and I hope your project works out.
I would definitely have to
I would definitely have to agree on the first reply in the sense that it matters what the concurrent users are. However, I don't suggest you over think yourself. Start off with a shared platform and move your way up. My suggestion is to go with a cPanel host, because migrating is very easy.
Once you get to heavy numbers, you're most likely going to have to go go dedicated where you split web and mysql, and that should last you for quite some time.
Hope that helps.
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Shared might be okay to start
A shared host might be okay to start with, but if you're going to be doing video conversion be prepared for your account to get temporarily suspended for CPU overages because of the overhead. There hasn't been any mention if this is a funded project or not. I'm thinking not because otherwise this discussion thread would not even exist for a number of reasons. Choosing a hosting provider can be a dicey business sometimes. I agree that you shouldn't overthink yourself, but on the other hand I don't want to see you paint yourself into a corner either. (ie outgrow a shared provider and then have to move the site elsewhere because you exceeded their offering capabilities)
atleast you need 2 dedicated
atleast you need 2 dedicated servers, one is for web server and second is for mysql database.
both servers should be connected with 100Mbps lan card and in same vlan.
for images and videos you can go for cdn, or put one more server for this.