I am developing an application that will collect journals from academicians, review it, and publish it on the site for the world to see. There would also be a blog, forum, and some form of social network.  Users would be allowed to submit documents, photos, and video. I am estimating that on an average a user will use up 1gb a year and we expect to host about 350 users on the site during the first year.  What hosting technology and requirements do you think i may need? Please are there any other considerations i should take into account?
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This is a  about  Related:      I have a question regarding capacity planning. Can the Server Fault community please help with the following:   What kind of server do I need to handle some number of users? How many users can a server with some specifications handle? Will some server configuration be fast enough for my use case? I'm building a social networking site: what kind of hardware do I need? How much bandwidth do I need for some project? How much bandwidth will some number of users use in some application?
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I do mockups and prototypes of sites and designs all the time, but I've always wondered if there is a standard size or width I should be using. Generally I'll make my document either 1024, 1200, or 2560px wide, depending on what I'm doing.  So what do you think? What is a good or standard size for this?
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In the era of big data, I find it surprising that banks and credit card companies only offer access to a ridiculously small number of transactions - often only your last 180 days, if that. The longest I've seen was 720 days going back. I suspect they do store everything, but intentionally limit access.  These transactions are text only, take up extremely little space, and storing an individual's lifetime worth of transaction would take less than 10MB of data; about the storage required by two MP3 files, and about 250k records per person per lifetime, if we generously assume everyone makes 10 transactions a day. But I'd be happy with only the last 10 years of transactions, so about 1MB per customer. One of the largest banks, JP Morgan Chase, has . That means 70TB of data for 10 years of records - hardly impressive for a corporation of that size, with , when .  By comparison, would you put up with Gmail or any online email provider keeping only the most recent 120 days worth of email? (And emails do take a lot more space than transactions, are far more numerous, and have to be instantly retrievable.)  Storage requirements for transaction activity are trivial in an era where we're throwing around petabytes and zetabytes.  Is there a sound reason for banks not offering access to all your transactions, other than legacy software on their side?      UPDATE: Somehow I hadn't found  asking the same thing.
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For the following pretty straightforward task: query a list of products from a DB and present it on a webpage, consider 2 setups:  Setup1: PHP script queries. All content is built on the server and the entire page is served back to the client.  Setup2: Static HTML "page skeleton" requesting content using AJAX. Received content is parsed on the client side using Javascript and rendered using innerHTML or similar.  Of course the second setup only makes sense when you have pages, categories and tags for the client user to choose from.  I need to compare these two, at least by means of:   time it will take content to be served user experience (setup1 is delivered as a whole, setup2 is delivered in "two parts") scalability - how do the setups compare when I have 100,000 queries daily   Any thoughts on the issue will be much appreciated.
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I'm trying to build a web application that is similar to Youtube (it's not a knock off), but I guess I don't know how video is served on the internet very well.  I know how to build regular database driven web applications, but nothing like the scalability of Youtube. All of the applications I have built before have all been run on one server with the files stored on the same box as the web server.  How does one decouple the application server from the file storage from the media server? I would more or less want four machines (clusters of machines):   Application servers -- Present the web page, handle user uploads, link the user's flash player to the correct media server etc. Database shards -- Store user information, check favorites, etc. File storage -- Store the media files Media servers -- Serve the media files   How do I hook all of this together? Which technologies should I leverage? Where do I go to learn more about architecting this?  How does Youtube's embeddable flash stuff work? I want to embed my flash player on other websites and have it tie into my architecture.  Note: I have looked into:   But I still don't get the overall picture of how this stuff ties together. If someone can explain in high level terms how all of this stuff works?  Are there dedicated client servers running internally to shuffle around all of this stuff between the application servers, file storage, etc. Is it all via HTTP using JSON, what is going on here!  Thanks!
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When I started my Masters thesis one advice I got for getting good material to read was to subscribe to several journals' alerts system, so that I would get mails with eTOC (electronic Table of Contents).  This was pretty cool then, for months I could stay on top of what's been published out there and was up to date in my own little narrow area. Now almost 3 years later that list of journals have expanded a bit, and the more work I have at the lab more mails that accumulate in my mailbox. What used to be no more than 10 unread mails is now about 900. The output is more than I can handle, what more restrictive method can I implement?  I guess it is pretty clear that this way of following literature is not sustainable in the long run. So I wonder if there are other and perhaps better ways of staying on top of recently published articles?    Please note that I have checked the following two questions prior to asking this one. I do feel though my question differs from these two in its essence.
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As the younger members of our group get older, they are going off to college or {gasp} getting on with their lives.  We still game but are finding it harder to get together as distances increase. Since they all have computers and are tech savvy, what software is available for virtual table top play?    Being a webmaster and database administrator I have access to all the technology I could possibly need.  So be sure to include system requirements.  I just need to know what my options are.  One thing I need to add.  Some of the players will still be at the physical table and 1 or 2 will be remote.  This means I need to accommodate both types in each game session.  Also having the ability to do Non-D&amp;D is a plus as our group plays many different systems.  For me there is only one answer.  I can try each of the systems since I'm webmaster/DBA  and have that kind of a setup, but I will in the end choose one.  (There Can Be Only One!) As a service to the group I will give a full 'review' of what I did to evaluate and what/why I choose a particular solution.  I think that in the end the fantastic answers here will help others regardless of what I do. Isn't that the best thing?
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Our company will be appearing on a prime time TV show this week, and they've told us we can expect around 200,000 visitors on our website all at once.  We normally only get about 100 visits per day, so I've no idea if we can handle that much traffic. We're hosted by 1and1.co.uk.  Are there any precautions we can take to prevent our site getting crippled?
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What is the maximum size for a MySQL table? Is it 2 million at 50GB? 5 million at 80GB?  At the higher end of the size scale, do I need to think about compressing the data? Or perhaps splitting the table if it grew too big?
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I am in need of a terabyte or so of storage space for Lucene indices on a testing server.  I'm having a hard time differentiating between disks like the  for about $450 vs  of dollars.  What concerns should I have regarding the 840 evo, and what should I be looking for?  This server will be used strictly for in-house testing purposes by our development team and will have to put up with periodic load testing.
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Youtube as we know, is massive. It has thousand of concurrent users streaming at least 2 megabytes per video. Obviously, that gets to be a lot of traffic... far too much for any one server.  What networking technologies allow pushing
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everybody,  in the last weeks we have defined addresses from the All Subscriber List that we want to keep and a number of 400k that we would delete.   The users we want to keep are divided into 4 different data extensions. Actually, the plan was to delete the All Subscribers and then upload the Data Extensions again and add the All Subscribers accordingly.  Is that possible? Or what would be the best course of action?  Thx
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I have a database, that due to some silly code issues has grown hugely. It is now sitting at 24GB, most of it is very unnecessary logging information (system generated debug information).  My server lives on a cloud hosted server. I am now sitting with 2 issues because of the file size:   I pay for storage. I am happy to pay for my core business, but paying for silly data seems....silly My backups are now huge also. I do nightly full backups, and then ship them off to an FTP server. This process is taking longer and longer.   Given my issues, is shrinking so bad? I will rebuild all my indexes. I did a dry run, and brought my database down to 6GB.  This guy (who I have always trusted as my SQL guru), says it's bad....mkay
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There is . Is the site appropriate for stuff related to requesting frameworks and libraries? Or should we have another site for that (e.g. name it Frameworks Recommendations or stuff alike)?  I can ask stuff there like: I need a software satisfying W, X, Y, and Z, but I'd like -some day- ask like: I need a Python library satisfying W, X, Y, and Z. The audience may be (and perhaps will be) different.    Is that website on-topic for stuff like that? Or should we open another proposal for that?  No: It's not about asking for a giga-dump for subjectivish questions. The linked-to-dupe question was written and answered with an old mindset and without Software Recommendations in mind. Also it does not consider this specific kind of questions but all the crap in one place. So, no,  is not an appropriate dupe mark for this question.
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I'm making a website on a free hosting that doesn't have much space or bandwidth. So I considered using Dropbox Public folder for static files, such as:   Javascript, CSS Images Downloads (each a few hundred kilobytes)   Does Dropbox allow such extensive usage, and what is the limit?
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This question was inspired by . There have been other similar questions, but none with the same criteria.  This is two questions in one.   How do you store financial/critical records that should survive anything but a fire and should be available for decades? Lets say I want to store family photos/videos and want people do be able to find them in storage 100 years from now and still be able to use them. How would this be done?   Criteria   Long term means 30+ years guaranteed. 100+ years average. [If this is not practical, use the closest solution] High volume means a couple terabytes. Answers can be 'no-compromise/industrial' solutions or practical solutions for the home office/small business user. Media will not be active during the timespan. (i.e., if you suggest hard drives, they will not be spinning).  Further, there is no expectation of needing to read these archives. They are there for emergency or "for future generations" purposes. Should not require maintenance (if at all possible).    My thoughts:   CD-R/DVD-Rs have proven to me, even in the short term, to be a terrible medium for backups. They seem to be very fragile and seem to lose their data a very short time even when in pristine condition. I can't help but think that storing data on a couple of 1TB hdd's and then expecting them to spin up correctly a decade or two later to be a terrible idea. Am I wrong? Industrial tape drives seem like a viable option?
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I have the following pieces of hardware I would like to network mostly for file sharing (media primarily): 1 gaming laptop, 1 i7 (2.3Tb storage) desktop, 1 P4 desktop (500g storage), and 1 250gig PS3.  I am looking to setup a linux host (with a PS3 media server) with the i7 desktop but am concerned about leaving it on all the time. What stripped down, low energy usage distro can I couple with which windows &amp; PS3 friendly software?  Also, how should i reformat my i7 (in terms of partitions, RAID options, whatever)? It has 2 1Tb drives (likely adding a third), and 1 320 gig.