Server building and website security...

[nebulus06]

In the near future in say 2 to 3 years from now I intend to be running a website containing a good deal of content that I hope will be obtaining about 1 million hits a day with around 10 000 transactions a day.

The scenario:
The website constitutes of a very large project that will be entirely coded and managed offline until both security and flawless (data/interface)intergration is reached. Also prior to its launch, we will be conduction large commercial and marketing advertisements via numerous media venues. This means that on launch day my server will need to support a large number of individuals smoothly.

My question is what is the minimal expense range you think would successfully handle the aforementioned requirements. This includes both security, ecommerce and server expenses.

Also can this be run from my own home or perhaps multiple homes?

Thanks...

[PLOBBY]

Home...if your expecting 1 million hits a day, and 10,000 transactions a day, no. Unless you can pay out the ass for an insane connection, an awesome server, and some very good equipment (firewall, switches, routers).

I mean yeah if there only visiting a few kb sized pages and thats absolutely it...The connection wouldn't have to be that large, but still would have to be very reliable from what your saying.

A buddy of mine, owns the second or third largest harry potter site in the world. I remember him saying he was paying 40 grand a year for hosting, but i could be completely wrong.

[David]

Datacentre all the way. If your power goes out on launch day you're pretty much <expletive>d.... ;)

Get a reasonable dedicated server. Say for approx $100/month. That should net you ~1TB of BW per month and at least 40G of storage and something like a 3Gig Celly or 1.8Gig Sempy which should be alright provided the database work isn't going to be hellish.

[su root]

If you are expecting 1 million hits per day, that's around 11 hits per second. If you figure that a normal website will see a curve between 8am-10pm depending on geographic audience. You will probably see 50-100 hits per second during peak hours. If your site is dynamic content, this would overload almost any single server.

The largest problem at this part is to design the website so that it is scalable. By scalable, I mean cachable so you can frontend it with caching proxies, and memcached so you can save on database queries.

At minimum, I'd say 1 or 2 proxies (lots of ram, fast disks), 1 webserver (lots of CPU), and 1 database server (lots of CPU, ram, fast disks, depending on database used). This doesn't include any fault tolerance or backup.

I doubt you will want to host this out of a house, too much can go wrong that will take your site offline for a great deal of time.

David: A sempron/celeron won't be able to do 1 million hits per day. The caches may work on servers like that, but definitely not the webserver or database server. 1TB/month bandwidth is conservative, but will work as long as you don't average over 33k per hit. I definitely wouldn't be hosting 10,000 transactions per day on a celeron, nor in my house.

[David]

If you are expecting 1 million hits per day, that's around 11 hits per second. If you figure that a normal website will see a curve between 8am-10pm depending on geographic audience. You will probably see 50-100 hits per second during peak hours. If your site is dynamic content, this would overload almost any single server.

The largest problem at this part is to design the website so that it is scalable. By scalable, I mean cachable so you can frontend it with caching proxies, and memcached so you can save on database queries.

At minimum, I'd say 1 or 2 proxies (lots of ram, fast disks), 1 webserver (lots of CPU), and 1 database server (lots of CPU, ram, fast disks, depending on database used). This doesn't include any fault tolerance or backup.

I doubt you will want to host this out of a house, too much can go wrong that will take your site offline for a great deal of time.

David: A sempron/celeron won't be able to do 1 million hits per day. The caches may work on servers like that, but definitely not the webserver or database server. 1TB/month bandwidth is conservative, but will work as long as you don't average over 33k per hit. I definitely wouldn't be hosting 10,000 transactions per day on a celeron, nor in my house.


I was thinking more in terms of starting out on a more conservative box, rather than laying out a few k for a couple of proxies and seperate web and database servers, although that would be preferred down the line.

[Ebola]

I can do it for you for 6 million dollars.

[Incesticide]

Heh, start your site out on shared hosting and scale from there. Don't plan on running something like that out of your home, or multiple homes.

http://dreamhost.com
http://webhostingbuzz.com

Pick your framework, decide your hosting from there.

[Oroka Sempai]

http://www.doteasy.com/

20GB HDD space, unmetered bandwidth, unlimited subdomains, 100 databases, unlimited e-mail with 100MB storage each (the 100MB doesnt come off your 20GB)... and more, $9.95 a month!

[dropadrop]

A big question is what platform you are going to run it on. If you are thinking in terms of budget, the software can make a big difference too. For 1000000 transactions a day you are going to need something really powerfull, I think Su root is pretty close.