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Old 2005-04-25, 04:52 PM   #1
Simon
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What kind of dedicated server/bandwidth will we need?

Hiya,

I'm trying to get some input on what kind of sever/bandwidth we should use for the Free Hosted Sites we're going to be offering as part of our affiliate program soon. We've had a paysite for a long time, but we're only now venturing into FHS -- actually because of suggestions we've gotten here. We're planning to have hundreds of free hosted sites on this new server eventually, and hopefully we'll have them listed on many great link lists, and we'll have lots of surfers visiting our free sites every day.

Since we've never done thumbnail galleries or free sites before, my question is this: what kind of box and what bandwidth do we need to support something like this with no troubles?

I'm thinking that most dedicated server plans will provide plenty of hard drive space, so it's more the processor(s) speed, amount of RAM, preferred OS, bandwidth, monthly transfer needs -- and anything else I'm not thinking of -- that I'd like to get whatever feedback I can on from folks here.

I'm not looking for a hosting company right now (though anyone's welcome to reply), just a good understanding of what kind of demands we need to meet so that our affiliates don't ever wind up with slow loading sites due to something we could have done.

TIA for whatever help you can offer,

Simon
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Old 2005-04-25, 07:36 PM   #2
cd34
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Really depends on what you are trying to do with your hosted stuff. If you are doing Hosted Free Sites with two Hosted Galleries behind it, you should treat it just as you would a gallery that you are submitting, and then figure out how much traffic you get from that, multiplied by the number of webmasters.

Since you have to pass affiliate codes, its my personal preference to use SSI over PHP to pass the query string from page to page, but, either one is fine. A relatively good server, P4 2.4ghz or better would have no problem handling 20mb/sec or so of traffic considering every page using PHP. Probably a bit more using SSI.

Since you have a very static setup, i.e. galleries are uploaded, there isn't much that will change, it would be relatively easy to rsync to another server and just use round-robin dns to 'load balance'.

Lets decide which method to use. My preference is SSI, so lets do it with SSI first. We will name the file gallery.shtml, and the webmaster will send his traffic to:

http://www.domain.com/gallery.shtml?affiliateid

The code on your page will look something like this:

<a href="http://www.site.com/page.html?<!--#echo var="QUERY_STRING"-->">Test Link</a>

If you wanted to use PHP, the webmaster will send his traffic to:

http://www.domain.com/gallery.php?affiliateid

The code on your page will look something like this:

<a href="http://www.site.com/page.html?<?php echo $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']?>">Test Link</a>

Remember, the pieces <!--#echo var="QUERY_STRING"--> or <?php echo $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']?> are replaced in your html whereever you need to have the affiliates ID coded. Since the page is parsed with either SSI or PHP, it will replace the 'bad html' before it is sent to the browser. You might need to use Notepad or some other text editor to do the final work since FrontPage and DreamWeaver may see the html created above as invalid.
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Old 2005-04-26, 12:35 AM   #3
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I no habla Frontpage, but I can confirm that Dreamweaver has no issues with inserting that kind of coding within links, I do it all the time.
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Old 2005-04-26, 08:13 AM   #4
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Quote:
Originally Posted by cd34
Really depends on what you are trying to do with your hosted stuff. If you are doing Hosted Free Sites with two Hosted Galleries behind it, you should treat it just as you would a gallery that you are submitting, and then figure out how much traffic you get from that, multiplied by the number of webmasters.

Since you have to pass affiliate codes, its my personal preference to use SSI over PHP to pass the query string from page to page, but, either one is fine. A relatively good server, P4 2.4ghz or better would have no problem handling 20mb/sec or so of traffic considering every page using PHP. Probably a bit more using SSI.

Since you have a very static setup, i.e. galleries are uploaded, there isn't much that will change, it would be relatively easy to rsync to another server and just use round-robin dns to 'load balance'.
Hiya CD, and thanks for the feedback.

Yes, our Free Hosted Sites will have the usual warning page, main page, and two gallery pages. The thing is that since we've never done free sites or hosted galleries before, we don't have any baselines for comparison. If we did, it might be a little easier to figure what our traffic load might be. So I'm trying to get an idea (in advance) of what loads we might expect, along with suggestions on how to configure a server box and bandwidth pipe to handle the demands.

Your suggestion was that a P4 2.4ghz or better would have no problem handling 20mb/sec of traffic (is that the traffic we should expect?). But you also mentioned rsync'ing to another box.

Now, if we've ever used round-robin dns for load-balancing on anything, it was something handled by our server techs and I failed to learn much about it. :-( But it seems from what you wrote that it would take two separate dedicated server boxes rsync'd so that the round-robin dns can split the requests.

So my next question is: "Do we need two dedicated servers for this?" (And, "What should I definitely know about rsync'ing and round-robin dns?")

Okay...yes, I know "how many servers do we need?" would be an easier question to answer if I could tell you how much traffic the server(s) will have to handle, or how many simultaneous requests we get. But that's the information we don't have quite yet. I'm basically trying to guess in advance what kind of traffic we may have to handle. Maybe we should arrange a test somehow first to be sure, but I was thinking this board definitely has people who already know these kinds of things. :-)

Regarding the methods for passing the affiliate codes, that was going to be another post from me. We're leaning toward using php over ssi, mostly to get more used to using it.

And thanks for the reminder CFNMPARTY, we're looking into burying the affiliate ID in the URL like you mentioned so it's not so easy for surfers to snip the query strings. I know that I've seen an outline of how that's done here, so I'll be looking around for it.

Thanks for the feedback so far, please feel free to add more!

Simon
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Old 2005-04-26, 12:38 AM   #5
cd34
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well, when I wrote that document a few years ago, dreamweaver did have a problem with it
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Old 2005-04-26, 03:09 AM   #6
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CD - like the new avatar -

Simon, just a suggestion, I like when programs have the code set up so it goes domain.com/aff_id/hfs_or_fhg/ seen some programs use this, others that don't. Have no idea about coding though.
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Old 2005-04-26, 11:30 AM   #7
cd34
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I would start it, run with it, watch the load and bandwidth, increase your plan as necessary. I wouldn't get too over-the-top with ordering a bank of servers until you have the concept working. The Rsync/Round-Robin DNS can come much later.

You can embed the affiliate's url in there with a mod_rewrite, something like:

Surfer sees: http://site.com/fhg/affid.html

You code for: http://site.com/fhg/index.shtml?affid

Your .htaccess (or preferably put in the config) would be:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*)\.html$ index.shtml?$1
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Old 2005-04-26, 12:31 PM   #8
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Don't know about Dreamweaver but GoLive handles includes and query stings very well. You do have to tell GoLive in its preferences when you first create a site to not cut off URLs after the "?" character. After that GoLive always leaves your code completely alone but if for some odd reason it doesn't then you can put it inside of its <noedit> tag </noedit>.
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