Scalability for Startups: How to Grow Up without Blowing Up

This is a useful post by Frank Mashraqi, Director of Business Operations & Technical Strategy for a top 50 website that delivers billions of page views per month.

Since scalability is considered a non-functional requirement, it is often overlooked in the hopes of decreasing time to market. Adding scalability down the road can decrease the time to market but only after assuming significant technical debt.

Balancing performance and scalability vs. fast iteration and cost efficiency can be a significant challenge for startups. The good news is that achieving this balance is not impossible.

Read the rest of the article here and view a presentation here.

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Cloud computing, grid computing, utility computing - list of top providers

You want to have a scalable website. You want a website which can handle traffic spikes (think if you are getting on Digg, Slahsdot, Reddit, Techcrunch or other very popular websites frontpage). Regular hosting companies (especially shared hosting) can offer only so much. The servers usually get crushed under the load in short time. But there is hope. A new breed of hosting companies emerged recently. A new breed which can offer you the scalability you need at a fraction of the cost. Welcome to the world of “cloud computing!” (or “grid computing” or “utility computing”, which are terms for the same thing). Here's a website which compiled a list of cloud computing hosting companies (with short descriptions, prices and customer lists for each of them). Read the entire article about Cloud computing, grid computing, utility computing list at MyTestBox.com - web software reviews, news, tips & tricks.

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Content Delivery Networks (CDN) – a comprehensive list of providers

We build web applications…and there are plenty of them around. Now, if we hit the jackpot and our application becomes very popular, traffic goes up, and our servers are brought down by the hordes of people coming to our website. What do we do in that situation? Of course, I am not talking here about the kind of traffic Digg, Yahoo Buzz or other social media sites can bring to a website, which is temporary overnight traffic, or a website which uses cloud computing like Amazon EC2 service, MediaTemple Grid Service or Mosso Hosting Cloud service. I am talking about traffic that consistently increases over time as the service achieves success. Google.com, Yahoo.com, Myspace.com, Facebook.com, Plentyoffish.com, Linkedin.com, Youtube.com and others are examples of services which have constant high traffic. Knowing that users want speed from their applications, these services will always use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to deliver that speed. What is a Content Delivery Network? A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations to deliver content more efficiently to users. The server selected for delivering content to a specific user is typically based on a measure of network proximity. For example, the server with the fewest network hops or the server with the quickest response time is chosen. This will help scaling a web application by taking a part of the load from the service servers. Read the entire article about Content Delivery Networks (CDN) list of providers at MyTestBox.com - web software reviews, news, tips & tricks.

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SMACKDOWN :: Who are the Open Source Content Management System (CMS) market leaders in 2008?

I came across an interesting study about who are the leaders in open source content management systems market in the year of 2008. The study was just released to the public and it was conducted by Ric Sheves from Water & Stone web development company. At 50 pages, there is a significant amount of data in this study that should be of use to developers or to anyone who is looking to commit to a web publishing system (also known as a Content Management System). Read the entire article about who the open source content management systems market leader is for 2008 at MyTestBox.com - web software reviews, news, tips & tricks.

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