hardware-infrastructure - hardware infrastructure for public web application

Question

I'd like to start a free budget/personal finance site and will need plenty of horsepower and storage. I'm definitely a nubee, so how does one get started in terms of hardware infrastructure? Do I need to get a dedicated IP from my ISP and obtain my own servers? Do I go with amazon or Sql Server Data Services/Azure or something like that? Is the latter services free or a discount offering available to non-profit/free services such as the budget/personal finance site I'm looking to start?

Answer 1

If you don't mind writing your web application in python, then I's suggest using Google App Engine. See: What Is Google App Engine?

Answer 2

当我对网站有新想法时，我喜欢做的是找到一个便宜的托管解决方案（每月 10 美元）。这让我可以测试这个想法，看看这个网站是否会成功。如果失败，我并没有浪费太多钱，如果成功，我可以升级到更好的托管（专用服务器）。

有许多可用的托管选项，其中一些具有出色的工具，例如在线 SQL Server 管理工作室。如果您准备处理防火墙问题、备份、存储等，您的另一个选择是自己托管。

Answer 3

There's really two ways to answer this question, what differentiates them is budget.

One is to properly design this solution, prototype it, benchmark the prototype, extrapolate anticipated user load, add overhead and scale accordingly. This takes time, costs but gives you a supportable solution that serves your customers well.

The other is to just give something, anything a go and fix the problems as they come along. This is quicker and cheaper but might be a headache for a while and might p*** off your customers.

Basically it comes down to budget.

Best of luck.

Answer 4

Whether it is feasible to DIY varies a lot by country...if you have a decent broadband connection with a fixed IP this can be the cheapest route to play around with first, especially if you need an awful lot of storage.

Note however that many fast broadband connections are only fast for downloads - when you're running a server, the speed your users will see is the upload speed, which is usually a lot less. Also, you'll need to do your own admin and backup etc.

Apart from this most hosting options have a price tag on top, varying from virtual hosts (sharing a real machine), to colocation (your machine in somebody's data center), to cloud services like amazon et al (which have a good scaling ability)- and you will need to shop around for the software stack and hardware features you really need.