Regarding sites like twitter

Hello,

So i am working atm on a social project that might be used by alot of users at the same time, so i was wondering where can i host my website so lets say 500k+ users at the same time wont have any lag or problem just like twitter,facebook,etc. I know they have their own data center but i mean where should i host my servers so i can get such stability 24/7. I hope someone can help me out and also please dont tell me about a high priced hosting company like 1k$ per month or such.

Thanks.

You expect to serve 500k+ concurrent users for less than $1K? Sorry, not gonna happen. Anyone who you tells you they can is lying. The hardware and infrastructure required for so much traffic doesn’t come cheap.

So how much it gonna cost plus what exactly is needed?

Both hard to say. Depends on how it’s set up, what the technical requirements are, etc.
In any case, I’d start small(ish), see what happens, and scale when needed. Something like a few nice Amazon EC2 to scale automatically would probably be a good start. Again, depending what you’ll actually need.

I am not sure if you got me wrong or i got you wrong, but i am looking for a hosting company where i can rent from it good servers for the start phase not buying a server, So lets say i will start small as you said what exactly i need for the server? and which hosting company and it will be great if you provided more enough like RAM/bandwidth/connection/location/hdd/etc

Let’s try a rough calculation of the bandwidth required
If we estimate that each user loads a page of 100kB every 30 seconds
500000 / 30 * 100KB = 1.6GB per second = you need 20GBit in connectivity :rolleyes:
So perhaps 30 high end servers (going to need plenty memory, good cpu and a fast disk array to serve a constant 1Gbps, and some spares for redundancy) at £500 each a month, then perhaps another 4 for load balancing, and another bunch for backup, and a database cluster…

I’d read 37signals ‘Getting Real’ online ebook, then reconsider prematurely grand hosting plans.

Well programmed, you will need cloud solution like yahoo and google uses. Important is to create the app most clever way. Sometimes apps are badly made so it consume X times more resources than is necessary.

A cloud solution in this case would mean that you will only be paying for the resources that you actually need instead of purchasing 30+ dedicated hosting accounts when one would possible be re than sufficient in the first month or two.

Cloud hosting is however massively more expensive per unit of bandwidth than dedicated servers, and is also generally so per unit of cpu. When you have a load balancer, you can set up 1 or 30 servers behind it (either real or virtual). The only advantage cloud hosting has is the capability to switch on and off server instances dynamically. If you have a reasonably predictable demand curve, hard iron is always much cheaper than cloud.

I say you start small first by getting a VPS, that will do it for the first months if the site will be succesful. Then upgrade to a dedicated server and so on. If youll get traffic, youll have enough income to afford the hosting, don`t worry. Just get that traffic, that is the tricky part, not the hosting. And good luck beating the giants!

Thanks all, i was wondering is there a section in that forum where i can hire freelancer or such thing?

There isn’t, but you can try the SitePoint marketplace.

Serving such amount of users would require strong datacenter backend, with multiple servers and management. You may also need to consider using cloud infrastructure with different hardware location.

Means you want to say if we required 30+ dedicated server then we can switch for cloud computing?What about 500k+ users concurrent,is it possible to handle by cloud computer when resources are shared?

You wouldn’t need 30+ servers to start with - on day one you are going to have plenty of spare capacity on the first server. You might grow fast and need a new server every week or grow slow and only need a new server every six to eighteen months. The speed of growth might vary with 18 months between needing one server and two and then three days from there to eight servers. How are you going to know when to buy a new server that isn’t going to be sitting around for months before its needed?

With a cloud solution you let the cloud provider worry about it. Their growth will be far more even because while one site is growing fast others are growing slow so they can reasonably add new servers at more regular intervals so as to ensure that they have enough thousands of servers to cater for next weeks growth.