Servers that cost more than my house
Over the last few days I’ve been debating over the best hosting solution for my most mammoth project. Finally we’re there and I’m very happy with what we’ve got.
Here’s something to think about - the servers will cost me more than my house does! I am sure that’s true for many internet businesses, but at the moment this is all being personally funded by me until we go live and start making money. At the moment things are such that I am happy and perfectly able to do this.
Why have I gone for something so expensive?
We do have some high end requirements as we are building is a platform for media distribution and aggregation. i.e. there is going to be masses of downloads, streaming and data transfer. We could have actually spent a lot more, but what we have opted for is something which is perfect for the initial launch and very scalable. The scalability was a major part of the consideration. I don’t want to experience problems later when we have increasing volumes of traffic and can’t grow our back end fast enough to deal with it.
We needed a solution which:
- Is located well for serving both the US and Europe
- Has a redundant set up - one server can go down and we’ll not lose any data or experience any downtime.
- Has the ability to transcode media files from one format and resolution to another
- Has its own mini CDN (Content Distribution Network) which makes large data downloads such as video streaming more efficient.
- Can plug straight in to a larger CDN if we have to.
- Can have up to 1000mbps per server connection – that’s a massive amount of data being transferred at the same time, we have loads of space to store media and
- No restriction on monthly bandwidth
- Masses amount of storage space
We have all this! Beyond that I get lost in the technical specifications of the servers.
I can’t wait to start getting some sites up and running.
I mean I really can’t wait - I need to get the sites up and making money to pay for this before it bankrupts me!
On an unrelated note
I’ve just had to replace 3 more tyres on my car and have the windscreen replaced on another. I don’t believe anyone has worse luck with cars than us. I’ll definitely be getting something fast, impractical, environmentally unfriendly and uneconomical when the time is right. I can’t see how it will possibly cost me any more than the current sensible cars do.
2 Responses to “Servers that cost more than my house”
1 Ross Williams 20 November 2008 @ 2:39 pm
Hi Tim - why are you going the co-located route rather than managed hosting?
Why not use Amazon S3 and their new CDN? Is this not a more scalable solution?
Am interested to know why - with what you say you need - you’re not using a cloud-computing approach?
Ross
2 Tim Rees 20 November 2008 @ 3:14 pm
Sir, I do believe you are much more of a geek than I!
We’ll be hosting in a shared data centre infrastructure. For me the benefits far out weigh those from any alternative.
Using a CDN is a relatively trivial matter. It is very easy to use someone like Limelight Networks when usage dictates we should.
Looking at Amazon S3 the actual data costs are no less than what it will be costing us. I did not investigate them personally so daren’t comment on the comparisons of using them as a “CloudFront”, especially considering I am not all that knowledgeable!
I am sure web 2.0 technologies for media storage and redistribution will become more standardised. For the moment I personally am more comfortable having a system which is fully custom designed and built rather than relying on others API’s.
The architecture and hardware configuration was jointly designed by the system administrator and project manager working on this. Both of whom I have 100% faith in having examined all our options and gone for the most suitable.
Leave a Reply