I guess this would be more of a question for the mods but... Recently I've come up with an idea for internet based business. This business primarily deals with hosting a large volume of mp3s for users to download. But here is the problem...I'm not a networking expert I am, however, computer literate, a fast learner, and not stupid enough to think I can do any of it on my own. Romulation looks to have the volume of content in storage (if not bigger) than I could imaging my own creating facilitating which is why I would like to ask the following questions: 1.How many servers does Romulation utilize? (Is it really just 1 North American and 1 European?) 2.What sort of servers (brand/specs) is Romulation hosted on? 3.Are the servers hosted independently or with a hosting company? 4.If with a hosting company, which host would the admin recommend? 5.What sort of bandwidth usage is experienced by Romulation weekly or monthly? (I mean bandwidth in terms of data transfer, the was hosting companies tend to use the term) 6. How much user traffic does the site generate? 7. What other factors should I consider? 8. What specific reading material would help answer similar questions? It is not my intention to be invasive, I just want to get an idea so I can better understand my own needs. Any information would be a HUGE help. If anyone can suggest some reading material, other questions to ask, or other forums and websites to research, that would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this. Cheers.
you need a lot of money, we have 6 servers and pay around $3,000 monthly. We have 2 download servers, 2 website servers, a database server and an email server. The email and web servers are nothing special in terms of specs; the database server is a quad core xeon with 6GB of ram, and the download servers are quad core xeons with lots of hard disks (EU server has 24TB worth of disks, this is reduced to 11TB after RAID 1 is applied). All servers have 2GB of ram, and with the exception of the download servers, 15k rpm U320 SCSI disks. the servers (excepting the EU download server) are hosted by a company called Bananabit Technologies. We would recommend them very highly. 5/6: Seph will have to answer these, or if he doesnt I can get the bandwidth stats from our host later. 7. Money. Where are you going to get the money to start up, and keep it running. 8. 'High performance MySQL' by Schwartz et al (ISBN: 978-0-596-10171-8) is one book both Seph and I have on our bookshelves. You need to be very confident with PHP and MySQL, good coding practices and coding for both performance and security. You also need a good grounding in optimising SQL queries.
I have no exact bandwidth stats for US server in absolute figures (I usually only care about 95th percentile) but based on the EU server figures I'd have to guess that our monthly bandwidth usage is about 75TB with 35 TB on the EU server and 40 TB on the US server. RomUlation generally generates around 70,000 to 95,000 unique daily visitors with around 650,000 to 1,000,000 daily page views done.
Thank you so much Loonylion and Seph! ;D I have been picking my brain over these factors and now I can proceed a little more clearly. You two have been a huge help.
no problem, feel free to ask any more questions. If you decide to go ahead with this idea then I'll put you in contact with our account manager at bananabit tech, he's a really helpful guy.
Many thanks, Loony! That would be most helpful. Feel free to PM me or I can message you later today. Thanks again.
