Hi, are there any business model resources/articles for building a business that will eventually need a high structured database such as EBay, Amazon, Myspace, Digg, and PlentOffFish? Do the creators start off small and find investors when the sites get large for server/hosting issues? I heard that the PlentOffFish owner operated his business from his home? I did some googling and found this from the PlentyOffFish creator, "a server with 2 Quad Core Intel chips(Zeon X5355 @ 2.66Ghz), 8 Gigs of ram (only using about 800 megs) and 2 hard drives using Windows x64 Server 2003. Total cost was a couple of grand." So if I invested a couple of grand on a server and perhaps have a server engineer on my payroll, would I be able to maintain a site that has top ranked alexa type of traffic? Thanks In Advance, - DigiP
Are you going to be wanting a server engineer to be able to come into your house 24/7? The main challenges come around the internet connection more than the server hardware initially... it is only later when you have a farm of servers working that the hardware is more difficult. You are much better off putting your server into a datacentre where they have half a dozen redundant leased lines, UPS, generators etc as well as onsite server engineers.... cant remember the last time ebay went off line due to someone forgetting to put 50p in the electricity meter. Some sites have started small and grown organically upgrading their codebase and hardware as they went. MySpace is a fairly good example where they started small on a CFM and PHP platform and over time have replaced the software with .Net and now have a massive farm of servers, you can see their hardware progression here http://www.highscalability.com/myspace-architecture
It is doubtful that it would be cost-effective for you to purchase hardware before you have a good idea of your business and your hardware requirements. I think it would be a much better plan to use some host until you have firmed up your hardware/software requirements. In any case, if you are planning a genuine high traffic site, then which ever way you get there, you will probably be able to easily pay for both solutions. The big cost is getting there. Good luck with your project. Rich