Serving the fastest pages

Static builds or purely dynamic?

[hdpt00]

I am in the process of starting a very large content website. We are looking at about 20,000 uniques per day. Now we only have 1 server (2GB/day transfer), so I am trying to keep the load down as much as possible.

I have two options in our custom built CMS. I can have the pages be purely dynamic and call the content from the MySQL database on every page or I can build the new pages and the affected pages (if the article link is listed on another page) every night or whenever I feel. What this will do is build static .html pages (parse .html as php) with a minimal amount of php in them just for cookies, log-in stuff, etc.

Do I have to worry about load with only 20,000 (~70,000 page views) per day or should I use the building static pages method? I want my site to be as fast as possible, obviously.

Thanks for any input!

[jatar_k]

at some point you will have more traffic, at least we all usually hope so ;), and you will need something more.

I would go with the static page gen. I would also cut down on images and anything else that ups bandwidth.

>> Do I have to worry about load

I think we should all worry about load, we pay for it after all. Keep the costs down and use the money where it's needed.