Hosting/Looking after big sites
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- Rickbass
Anyone here host/manage/run a really heavy use site? I'm wondering if they can give me a few tips/pointers about cost effective ways of doing this.
I'm looking after a record company who've expanded pretty rapidly in the last couple of years. When I started doing this, they were going through about 200GB of data transfer a month. This month, I think the site will get near 10,000GB.
Does anyone have any experience of anything similar? How best to manage such expansion? Where to host sites that get such heavy use so that it doesn't totally break the bank? Anyone know anyone I can talk to?
Any help greatly appreciated.
- justjeff0
Yea, I help manage some decent sized sites. It's generally more involved than can be explained on a forum (I'm sure you already know that ) , but if you have any specific questions, I can probably help.
- industry730
10 TERABYTES!? that is allot of music.
basically if they are that huge, i dont think you will find a cost effective solution other than having dedicated server possibly from everyones favorite hosting company MediaTemple. or have your own servers hosted in a co-location center
Now i have to ask. for that much data transfer i would have to guess that it is not just the website? is there a FTP site that they use internally to transfer uncompressed audio and artwork to? if so then there is absolutely no reason for that to be on there Website. they should have a server at their location and at least a T-1 line for that type of use.
Let me know if you have any more questions and i would be glad to help
- justjeff0
It's very possible to do 10TB/month with music, without any internal filesharing type usage. Hell, I've seen 10TB/month on text+image sites (no music, no videos) - it's not that hard to do.
Yes, dedicated is a must. Moreover, more than one server is much more likely (I'd probably say at least 3, 2 web, 1 db - even better 4 as 3, 1, with one of the webservers serving as a backup database).
If it's mostly music + media, a content distribution network (Akamai, limelight, mirror-image, etc) may save you a lot of expense, infrastructure, and has an added bonus of providing quicker downloads to the end users (distributed systems = geographically closer = bonus).
It's not rocket science, but it's not terribly easy either. At 10TB/month, I'm guessing you're realizing that. You may find it easier to find a hosting company that will manage it for you, or you may find that a part-time consultant will save you a lot of headache (I've served both of those roles for some very busy sites in the past)