Hello, I am creating two different websites. One will be a video encyclopedia type of thing, and another will be pretty much a y0utube clone. First of all, I looked in other forum topics to place this, and this is the best place I can find that has any relevance to what I'm asking. So if I have posted in the wrong area, please feel free to move it. Because my video encyclopedia will be similar to the y0utube clone site, except with a lot less projected users and viewers, I am worried only about the clone site. I have been doing a lot of research before I buy my server parts and I decided on 1 quad core xeon with 8 GB RAM and 500 GB HD space. I know for a fact that 500 GB won't go very far at all, but I just want to get some numbers in before I go buying more servers, especially money. As I was doing research on y0utube and google's history (I idolize and try to mimic them), I found out that Apache is not good for what I plan on doing. I discovered lightttpd server which is, apparently, faster than apache. Can anyone explain and give me some details on the difference and how that can really matter? I never dealt with so many users as youtube or google, so I really don't know what to do. Thanks!
You assume you will have as many users as youtube and google! Basically lighttpd is generally faster for static content than apache simply because it strips out all the fancy stuff like PHP, perl and whatnot. That will generally mean youll need two servers, one running lighttpd for static content, and another running apache for dynamic content. That will work well and fast, but do you really need that much? If you do fair play youll be a rich man! If not KISS [keep it simple silly] until you need to expand.
Thanks for the reply m0nkeymafia, but what do you mean by fair play? Honestly, I hope to get as many users as y0utube and g00gle, but I know I won't. However, JUST IN CASE, I want to be ready and not have to scramble up crap service if I ever have that problem..