my company wants to host out website in house

ronjon

can anybody suggest as to what kind of equipment / connection we would needto host a site using php and mysql that would recieve about 20,000 hits a day?

also... im using the non enterprise edition of mysql...does it matter?

etrooper

You should be right on a nice dual pentuim 4 3.0 gHz box with a few gig ram (...I can dream), running Linux or *BSD, set up with apache webserver and the latest mysql.

As for connection, I am not to sure what you have available, nor what you would need for that sort of traffic?

Roger_Ramjet

Why in-house?? Even if you put the server outside your firewall, you will still be telling the world where your network is and setting yourselves up for an attack. Far better to host your site on a secure server at a good ISP, or co-locate your own server with them. Let them worry about their network security rather than you worrying about yours. Get your systems people to re-think this on security grounds.

Any entry-level server from Dell, or Sun, or similar will handle the load. Stick to a Unix operating system (solaris, linux, etc) and Apache for any web server; NT and IIS are a complete pain in the a$$ by comparison, and full of security holes like all Microsoft operating systems. Software for Unix systems is also a lot cheaper, or free.

It is not the number of hits so much as the size of your pages, and hence the number of packets sent, that will define the bandwidth required. If you are only sending 1 or 2 mostly text pages to each visitor then a high speed DSL link would probably do. If your site is graphics intensive, or visitors will be looking at many pages then you'll probably need a T1 Frame Relay for high availablity at peak loads: Expensive.

But again, if you co-locate your server at an ISP, then you will be able to contract for the average bandwidth that you use, and raise or lower the upper limit as required.

ronjon

thanks thanks thanks. thanks. thanks thanks.

MarkR

As long as you have the expertise to support the server properly in-house it should be no problem.

20k hits a day is light to moderate, I wouldn't worry about it.

Mark

yelvington

If you host your own server, you'll need to be careful to set it up on a firewalled "DMZ" network segment, so that it's protected from the raw Internet, but your internal network is further protected from the DMZ. As others have suggested, 20K hits a day isn't a big deal, although you can shoot yourself in the foot with fat pages, big downloads, et cetera.

Network access also shouldn't be a big deal -- your company's pipe usage is probably very asymmetrical (lots of incoming, hardly any outgoing).

Nevertheless ... consider also self-managed outsourced hosting. In other words, it's your box to manage, but it sits in somebody else's data center. Server Beach has dedicated servers starting around $100/month. If the server gets rooted, your network isn't at risk.