I don't know if I worded it correctly, but looking for server(s) to host a video site with lots of traffic - say something almost as busy as youtube. Do they use multiple servers, etc?? Anyone have experience with this size/bandwidth of a site? I never had to get into this realm of servers so I am a noobie at it. Thanks for the help in advance!
Something the size of Youtube will definitely have multiple servers, probably even in multiple locations.
I would highly suspect that they use multiple locations and now that Google owns them you could be sure of it. They probably use load balancing between their servers but also all the Data Centres. So if one D.C. goes down the others hold the weight. debunked are you looking for Data Centres for a setup?
To tell you the truth I don't know what I am looking for yet, this is in the investigating period of the startup.
all the above content is pretty much what I have to say: you need multiple servers, load balance between them and it's best to have in different location to server the needs from those country i.e. faster service , faster download. To set up such things, you may look at a high $$,$$$ investment.
It be a setup of multiple machines. There would be machines dedicated just to serving video's while others would be serving the actual web page itself generating it with whatever language it's coded in. So it's not a 1 server job if it is system that should be fully scalable.
MediaTemple was horrendous for me, but you may be able to find something similar, that spreads their hosting across hundreds of servers (clustering), you'll pay a lot for it though. I can't IMAGINE youtube's bill.
you will need server clusters atleast if you want to start something like that, contact rackspace.com for a start
Yes, there are a few estimates I have read that were all about 1 million a month for hosting/bandwidth. These were all from about this time last year.