7 replies to this topic

[fread]

I have an idea for a commercial website which will be tailored for my country. I know given a month or two I hack up a few webpages and put up a fairly descent website. In essence the site will operate something like a wiki with some other features I prefer not to disclose publicly (Intellectual Property theft. hehe).
From my initial plans the site will have a lot of pictures and would include a few search forms which would suggest searching which then suggest a way to store and retrieve data.
I looked at a lot of the hosting companies and there offers and some are actually pretty good, but I want to try and host the site on my own.
The problem is $1US is $6.34 in my currency, so even a host that offers a service at lets say, $20US a month is pretty expensive for me especially since I don't know if the site will succeed of fail.

Serving up webpages is one thing. Maintaining/configuring and updating a active database is another which leads to my question: Is it practical to host a site that will rely very heavily on its database on one's own.

Experience

• Web - Built a website from scratch for a semester project a couple of years ago. Never really did anything else in that area after that. It included XHTM, CSS and JavaScript.
  
• Server - I successfully configured Ubuntu server on several occasions to serve-up web pages on an intranet. I would then dump all the html files in the appropriate directory and the rest was history.
  
• Database - I know SQL b/c of school and i have an advance Database course next semester. No real world applications.
  
• Linux - Capable: Install/Configure/Run - Its also my default O.S.

Opinions would be greatly appreciated.

[Orjan]

get a cheap web hotel first, and if it works and you get some revenue, move it to an vps. there are hotels from less than dollar a month.

[fread]

But what about the database? I will need to practice with a live database.

[Alexander]

fread said:

But what about the database? I will need to practice with a live database.

Web hosts (the cheap ones) usually have large shared database servers (i.e. mysql02.somewebhost.com), these work and are as you would want them, you just may be slightly limited in users/database count if those are important to your application.

If you want to practise, you can even try to find a free host (they "work", and can serve as a development testing site) which has a database. Most PHP web hosting's do.

Quote

Is it practical to host a site that will rely very heavily on its database on one's own [server?]

Generally a site does not require a beast of a computer to run. If you have tens of thousands of database entries, and your application cannot afford the optimizations that many DBMS engines provide then you may take a hit for example with harddrive speed. Bandwidth and open ports are another hindering issue for self hosted servers.

It is a little vague, I would try to get a cheaper web host (3-15 USD monthly) and only actually purchase it once I had made the site on localhost. You can always pay for one month, and for testing if you so feel inclined.

Alexander.

[fread]

Quote

Is it practical to host a site that will rely very heavily on its database on one's own [server?]

Yes, I was referring to one's own server.

Quote

Generally a site does not require a beast of a computer to run. If you have tens of thousands of database entries, and your application cannot afford the optimizations that many DBMS engines provide then you may take a hit for example with harddrive speed. Bandwidth and open ports are another hindering issue for self hosted servers.

Well eventually I could see the database growing to that size and larger, but that would take a few years the way I plan to acquire the data. You spoke about hard disk speed. If I have two or three servers serving up the web pages; do you think that will make a big difference?

Idea!
What about mysql database? You think if I install it on a ubuntu server it could do the job. The thing is i have a couple pcs at my disposal I could use to make a small server farm in the interim. Then I am guessing I would have to duplicate all the data and all database writing on each server.

[Orjan]

You don't need more than one server for a very very long time. Codecall here is on one server, and it has a very big database and has lots of database accesses on each page. When using many servers but look at them as one in the whole, it's called clustering. There is need for it when you come up to lots more than 1000 simultaneous users, probably even lots more.

[Alexander]

Multiple systems of which are slaves to the master server can be beneficial, you could employ Linux's logical volume manager (LVM) to transparently mirror machines or set MySQL to push data to the slave machines separately. This may be of minimal benefit to performance, unless there are too many requests for one machine and it would be wise to off-load it to another.

I can almost guarantee you will not grow out of an old computer for quite some time (if it can run the server applications without running out of resources), and if your application is written well then it MySQL should easily be able to handle itself with hundreds of thousands of records if they are properly indexed. It is mainly the amount of people whom use it, rather than how big it has grown.

When people (many people per minute), bandwidth, read/write speed and uptime, in other words "reliability" become a deciding factor in success it would then make sense to get a VPS and let them handle what they do best - disk speed, DNS, and server configuration. A shared hosting would fit somewhere inbetween, mainly it is for convenience and development and should work for the most part.

I will welcome you to set up a server on your home PC and test it (you only need your IP if you do not wish for a domain as of yet). There are many guides on how to set up a server to running condition, and you can benchmark/test first hand what it can do!

[fread]

Thank you very much for your taughts thus far. I will post feedback and further questions as the need arises.