LAMP website, ~ 12 million page views per day

Which hosting partner and how many servers do i need?

[priidik]

We are working on social-networking website.

I have a question regarding servers/hosting. Can you suggest how many servers/bandwith do i need to serve about 10 - 20 million page views per day?

[txbakers]

Hi, welcome to the WEbmaster World and thanks for posting.

There's no hard and fast rule about number of servers or bandwidth.

With that many visitors (more than Google it seems) I'd suggest a dozen top of the line servers, mirrored around the world.

Bandwidth really only relates to the size of page you are sending.

[trillianjedi]

That's nearly 200 page views a second.

I'd suggest a dozen top of the line servers

If it's a dynamic site, quadruple that to 48 servers.

That's a lot of anticipated traffic for a site that's not even built yet. Are you sure about this?

TJ

[priidik]

Not sure for 100% but this info is for planning purposes.

[Angelis]

You might want to get some load balancing servers in the mix as well so the traffic is sent to where the least load is being experienced.

[FridayNight]

Depends on many things:

1 - what DB will you use
2 - how will you optimize SQL queries
3 - what kind of CPU
4 - what kind of disks
5 - RAM
6 - how many SQL queries per user? it is different if you have one or 100... much different!
etc. many many things.

I can tell you I have a website with 10.000+ visitors per day, approx 20. SQL queries per user and it is handled by one dual CPU, 2GB ram, SCSI disk. Anything more than that, the server wouldnt be able to handle it. It is already at 90% of resources at spikes.

If you are going to have millions of users daily, you dont even think of starting something with 1 2 3 servers because your site will be more offline that online. You must build a really strong structure with load balancers and more servers. How many? I have no idea but I have a friend who runs a news site, around 100.000 visitors per day and they have 2 servers for the DB + 4 servers for the website.

Probably traffic will increase over time - you will be able to see what is happening and you will add more servers later. If you start with 10 millions per day then you are in trouble.

My question is: how are you going to get 10+ mio visitors from the start? It's *almost* impossible (and that's good for you ;)

[priidik]

I am not talking about 10 mio visitors daily. Itīs about page views. 10 - 20 mil pageviews is not so much.
If visitors looks 100 pictures in one session itīs already 100 pageviews.

Our plan is to use cache extensively to optimize and limit mysql queris

[FridayNight]

Use heap tables where possible. Make sure to re-read help about how to set indexes. Once I did a mistake and site was 200x slower (talking about larger db). It took me days to find out. Dont make the same mistake.

[Namaste]

why only "top of the line" servers?

why not a combination of Dual Xeons with Raid for the MySQL; and P4s as Webservers & Image servers? Even Celerons for the imageservers.

Most IMPORTANT, use a caching engine for the PHP. And buid it all in PHP4. [webmasterworld.com]