What is required for a huge bandwidth site?

[Dudermont]

What is required for hosting an e-commerce site that has 10,000+ visits a day?

The owner of the company was thinking that we should have our own server location with fiberoptics and such. (in the future)

I was thinking that a datacenter would be a much better solution.

I have never had to deal with anything like that type of bandwidth.

Your experience with big bandwidth sites would be appreciated.

Thanks
Jonathon

[bufferzone]

Well! You need to consider all aspects on your system. Of course your bandwidth and servers needs to be broad and fast enough. But you also need to look at things like backup solution, maybe failover cluster, which requires you to have a double armament of beefy servers. Firewall is a major issue, it needs to be able to handle the bandwidth, it needs to be able to handle http traffic safely and you need failover. A solution like this will cost you major buck in hardware an knowledge

[Dudermont]

I guess before I get into any details. My first question is; Do most people set this up themselves or use rented servers in datacenters?

When I heard about it. A datacenter is what first popped into my mind.

[karmov]

A lot of it depends on your facilities and the facilities of the data centers you're looking at. Bufferzone mentions some good things to think about. To add to that, think of emergency power in the event of a power failure and not just whether or not you should buy yourself a UPS, but rather what happens to your connection as well.

We have a backup generator for our server room here, but down the chain there's a switch that doesn't just before the router that does. That single point of failure means we're down during an extended power outage (the switch has a UPS on it to buy some time) despite the fact that the connection from our router out is up and our servers are up. Ask these questions about your site and about the data centers. Ask about a whole lot of other reliability issues as well. Proper cooling is a major factor in server reliability.

You guys may have everything you need on site in which case there may be no need to go to a data center. Ask yourself lots of questions though.

Oh yeah, and can't forget to price it out :)

[peterdaly]

I have hosted that visit load in the past (before Yahoo dropped Google...and my referals) on a T1 from a Colo.

I have some hefty database requirements, so I have my own 4 cpu and 8 disk server to save on costs. 10k visits a day is really not that "huge."

If it weren't for my database requirements, I'd be hosting off an entry level leased server from a hosting provider. I currently pay $95/month for my leased Celeron on a (really) HUGE connection.

Want redundancy? Get two. I'd figure you can lease two decent servers with good bandwidth for $400/month.

[Visit Thailand]

Forgive me but what exactly is the bandwith? You mention 10,000+ visitors a day but not want the bandwith needed or even currently used is?

[Dudermont]

I guess it seems like a lot because it is more than I ever had to deal with before. The bandwidth will not be that high I guess. It is totally database driven though so I guess the servers should be pretty good and we need redundancy.

Thanks for the replies. I think I was worried that it would take a lot because of how the person told. "You don't realize how much bandwith this will use..."
:)

But the system is pretty similar to one that I currently run, I would expect the bandwitdh to be about 6 gigs a day. Just lots of transactions.