hello guys... its me again, your neighborhood newbie.
ive asked a similar question before.... "we plan on getting a certain load a day... can we handle it?"
well... i ask it again, but this time with more detail.
heres the deal.
i - a newbie, have been building a website, similar to myspace.com and friendster.com. I have been working on it for some time - over two years ( i started building it when i knew jack squat about php, hence the taking such a long time ). I have invested a lot of time and effort learning about the business side of things and quite soem time as well on the technical side of things, but am still uncertain about whether this is going to 'technically' work.
here's the deal #2.
i want around 50,000 users.
the page payload is about as much if not a tad bit more than friendster or myspace.
i have never built or arranged for hosting for a site that expects this much traffic - so i dont know what to expect.
my code is so so efficient... there can be a lot more tweaking done to make it more efficient.
im using php, mysql, windows xp enterprise(for now..will switch to linux), apache
i eventually want the 50,000 users, but... can expect a slow build on the userbase
i expect steady traffic 24 / 7... but i also expect the bulk of the traffic to come between 4pm - 1am - more and more dense around 8pm-10pm
the site is currently configured to have the html, php, and database to sit in one machine.
now.... im about two months from launching this thing, and the worry about the technical side of things has again reared its ugly head...and is in need of my attention - unfortunately, again, i am a newbie and dont even know where to start researching this... i asked hosting companies...but they are as clueless as i am... its sad. so.. i turn to you guys once again for advice and opinions.
please give me some advice as to how i can make this all work.
essentially what im asking is how much hadware or hardware service, i.e. - hosting service this is going to take... like, connection speeds, the kind of hardware (i.e. 3.5 ghz, 2 gig ram, 300 gb hd, gb lan.. etc.) - those kinds of things; or whateverelse concerns you guys think i should have and should take in careful consideration. or maybe you guys have suggestions as to a certain architechture i should look into to make this thing work... like... if i should split up my database into multiple different machines or what not... things like that.
i have been coding this thing for over two years...but have dreamt of this for over four years... i would really like to make this all work...so your sincere advice and/or help would be very much appreciated - in other words, all the other newbies on this site that have nothing but guesses like myself ( as much as i appreciate you guys as well), please refrain from posting your suggestions, cause it just gets me more confused and throws my research off and just eats up more time that i can be spending on finishing my code. so please, if possible, i would like the advice and opinions of those who feel they have a really good grasp of my situation here, and feel that their advice would steer me in the right direction.
thanks again in advance, cause i know you guys always pull through for me
-ron
